


Studies

by aesc



Category: Shame (2011), Wanted (2008), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Age Difference, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece & Rome, Alternate Universe - Animals, Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Dogs, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Alternate Universe - Renaissance, Alternate Universe - Shipwrecked, Alternate Universe - Space, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Androids, Anonymous Sex, Authority Figures, Big Brothers, Blind Date, Body Worship, Books, Charles Getting Uncomfortable, Childbirth, Crack, Crossover, Daydreaming, Dirty Talk, Fluff, Fruit, Gay and Mutant in the 1960s, Implied Underage, Inspired by Fanart, M/M, Max Simon and Wesley are terrible brothers, Mind Games, Modeling, Mpreg, Mutant Registration, Nudity, Oral Sex, Professor/Graduate Student, Sex Addiction, Slavery, Telepathy, Traditions, Tumblr Prompt, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, authority kink, badasses left and right, inspired by gifsets, inspired by xmentales chat, of a sort, they're on a boat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 11:42:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 52
Words: 57,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesc/pseuds/aesc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of ficlets and snippets inspired by Tumblr and #xmentales chat.</p><p>So far: Charles is a cat or a Renaissance-era muse or a professor or an imprisoned high-level telepath or a young man of the senatorial class in Rome or an Oceanid. Meanwhile, Erik is sick or a talented but struggling painter or a graduate student or a spy searching for his missing telepath or a former gladiator-turned-slave or a pirate. Also they are both seahorses. Or fae. Or gods. Or platypuses. Or genetically-modified fruit. Or space travelers. Or on a date. And there's one with Wesley Gibson and Brandon Sullivan. And one with Wesley again, but also Max, Simon, and Brian. And a couple of A/O snippets, one on a boat and one in a bedroom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The curative properties of cats

**Author's Note:**

> Notes for this one: Erik is sick and Charles is a telepathic cat. Yes, you read that right. No, you're not hallucinating.
> 
> Inspired, as so many things are, by [palalife](http://palalife.tumblr.com)'s adorable art of sick!Erik and cat!Charles, and originally posted [here](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/42434995743/palalife-yes-i-am-officially-sick-now-orz-my). JUST LOOK HOW ADORABLE.

Most people who were intelligent or at least had survival instincts knew not to be in the same space with Erik when he was sick. Nearby metal tended to warp when he sneezed or blew his nose, and as Raven liked to say when he wasn’t paying attention, misery only elevated Erik’s crankiness to near-epic proportions. Darwin, fortunately for the rest of the house, saw Erik’s flushed face and undignified, swollen, runny nose and, after making sure he had tea and orange juice, cleared himself and everyone else out to run errands.

Only Charles stayed, after pointing out that his old owner, the world’s craziest crazy cat person Dr. Xavier, had left him the entire mansion and as Erik could hardly kick Charles out of his own house and Charles was not an outdoor cat, he was staying.

Of course, “staying” for Charles didn’t mean sunning himself in the library or napping in one of the bedrooms. It meant “sitting right on top of Erik,” who was much too sore and weak to protest Charles climbing on top of him.

“Get off me, you’re too hot,” Erik complained as Charles kneaded contentedly on Erik’s hip. “It’s like wearing a furry electric blanket.”

“Mrrrrr,” Charles said, before telepathically adding _You’ll be having chills next_ and kneading at Erik some more. His claws made prick-prick noises against the afghan Erik had, despite his weakness, managed to pull over himself.

Sure enough, Erik went from near-roasting to absolute zero within two minutes. As he shivered miserably, Charles made a concerned noise and hopped off Erik’s hip. A moment later, he squirmed under Erik’s chin, presumably because he felt Erik would breathe better through a faceful of greyish cat hair.

 _I‘ve told Darwin and Sean to pick up some chicken soup while they’re out_ , Charles said as he began to purr. _I hope you save me some._

“I’ll think about it,” Erik rasped. Charles rumbled happily and tucked himself into an even tinier ball, his paws over his eyes.

Very much against his will, Erik drifted off to sleep.


	2. True facts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> See if he ever let Charles put his ovipositor anywhere near Erik again, Erik vowed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: They're seahorses. And if you think about it, it's trippy because Charles has the mutation but Erik is still the pregnant one. So I guess mpreg quasi-warning. Also, all my facts come from [True Facts about the Seahorse](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqYUTTqupOY).
> 
> Written as a result of the total insanity that is the #xmentales nightly chat and upon the request of [cygnaut](http://iteribidem.tumblr.com/), who is a weirdo.

Erik decided he hated being pregnant. First, he had to eat at least ten thousand brine shrimp a day to keep the little bastards in his belly happy. Carrying around over 300 babies made it difficult to float aggressively. The babies and the thousands of brine shrimp played havoc with his figure, which had been exceptionally elegant and graceful even for a seahorse. Even worse, somehow the babies interfered with his sand-controlling powers.

Crankily, Erik bumped along the ocean floor, resigned to allowing the currents to do most of the work. To think, he was sentenced to another week of this torment. Just three weeks ago he and Charles had been wrapped up together under the moonlight and Erik had sung him his favorite songs while they mated.

See if he ever let Charles put his ovipositor anywhere near Erik again, Erik vowed.

“Erik!”

Speak of the devil. Charles, still unfairly svelte, drifted up to him, his long neck folding around Erik’s in an embrace.

“How are you this morning, my love?” Charles asked, nuzzling him affectionately.

“I’m fine,” Erik grumbled and let Charles wrap their tails together.


	3. Chiaroscuro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lehnsherr drew close, bending over him. An eagle stooping over its prey, like Jupiter in truth, Charles imagined, his grey eyes as divinely implacable and hungry. His lips parted, in the inner lining moist and flushed as if Lehnsherr had been licking or biting at them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: Renaissance AU in which Erik is a Jewish painter in Florence struggling to get commissions and Charles becomes not only his model but something more.
> 
> Inspired by [this completely totally and in all other ways tantalizing](http://starrose17.tumblr.com/post/41802951189) gifset by [starrose17](http://http://starrose17.tumblr.com). The part of the ficlet from Charles's point of view is from [this one](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/41985613337/thedameloves-starrose17-behind-the-scenes). Both are stupidly hot and you should go admire them.

The guild had not even bothered to send a messenger; its silence spoke loudly enough, and the pitying contempt he’d seen on Tomasso di Messina’s face had driven it home. No matter his skill, his refusal to convert meant the guild’s refusal to admit him.

He would survive, Erik told himself. His portraits for the Florentine merchants earned him more than a sufficiency, and enough of a reputation that the Gentiles of the city had begun, however cautiously, to inquire after the Jew who painted as if an angel guided his brush. Erik couldn’t think of the expression without a snort of disgust; if his nation were supposedly cursed, as the Christians had it, why would G-d bless one of them, a man of obscure birth and uneven faith, with a talent for painting tributes to human vanity? For that matter, if one of the sons of G-d did guide his brush, the damn guild would recognize divine inspiration and let him join.

In the midst of artistic fury, living on whatever scraps he remembered to swallow and nearly bankrupting himself to buy candles and lamps to work at night, and his face tear-streaked with tempera and his fingers sticky with yolk and powdered dye, it felt more as if a devil rode him. The guild seemed to prefer that line of interpretation. 

_Survive_ , Erik reminded himself. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need the guild, but membership meant a wider audience, more patrons, students and assistants enough for a proper workshop, better materials. At the moment, Erik was on the wrong end of a day spent rejecting various models for his first major commission, and the last candidate, a gawky dark-haired young man, clearly anxious about his presence in the Jewish quarter of the city, had only a few minutes ago collected his things and hustled out. He would have done for a shepherd, or a young Spartan taking up arms for the first time, but not for what Emma Frost von Schauen wanted.

Suddenly irritated despite his exhaustion—the exhaustion of tedium and futility, the worst kind—he began to clean up. Scrap canvas and paper went into their storage, the few paints he’d bothered with carefully corked and the pigments stowed away in their secret niche. Erik glowered at the model’s couch in the middle of the studio floor and resisted the urge to shove it into the corner. Instead, he took the the heavy draping, meant to mimic the fall of a bride’s dress in a just-finished wedding portrait, and began to fold it.

He had his hands buried in yards of satin when the knock sounded on his workshop door. Before Erik could quite work out who would disturb him so late on a Friday afternoon, with Shabbos a mere handful of hours away, the door swung open.

A young man stood there, framed in the doorway and haloed in the golden light of a late summer day. Erik’s eye, trained for detail, caught the particular, indescribable shade of the blue of the young man’s eyes, the promise of his body underneath his ill-fitting clothes.

Erik, belatedly aware that he was staring, snapped, “What do you want?”

“Oh,” the boy said in atrociously accented Italian, “I heard from Andrea Castigliari that you had scared off yet another model, and I thought if you were still in need of one, I might offer my services. But,” he added with a smile that managed to be both polite and infuriatingly knowing, “if the position has been filled..?”

“No!” The word got out before Erik could stop it. He reined himself in and impatiently gestured for the boy to stop hovering in the doorway. “That is to say, everyone I’ve seen today has been useless. Do you have experience?”

The boy rattled off a few names Erik recognized, but paid little attention to. That mouth, despite the accent, moved gracefully around the syllables, red as a girl’s but utterly without innocence. No, Erik decided, there _could_ be innocence if the boy wished it, but knowledge would hide in the corners of those eyes of his, and purpose. Calculating, enticing, and knowing the beholder would be enticed.

“Very well,” Erik said and, to prevent himself from doing anything foolish, retreated to his easel. He gestured at the small stool near the couch. “If you could disrobe?”

“Of course,” the boy murmured.

Nimble fingers worked through the ties and buttons, pushing fabric aside and down to reveal a strong, muscled back, not classically athletic or the sort belonging to a Roman warrior, but its own kind of ideal. Erik swallowed and busied himself with his pencils and needlessly arranging his paper, but helplessly drawn back to slim hips and pale skin, pale enough to beg for bruises. The boy straightened up and turned, unclothed by any scrap of fabric or modesty, and Erik flushed to see his small, dark nipples and to imagine kissing them, taking the boy’s tousled brown hair in his fingers (staining those soft, disobedient strands with paint) and pushing his head back to bite the flawless, blushing column of his throat, or perhaps stroking the boy’s cock to see how it looked erect.

“So.” The boy arranged himself _contrapposto_ on the stool, somehow oblivious to and yet perfectly aware of Erik sitting in aching, desperate silence, “what is is it you’re painting?”

The subject Countess von Schauen had wanted was, of course, trite and done to death. The eagle, the young man swooning in its claws, Olympus towering in the background. But, Erik thought as he began to sketch, something different—Jupiter conquered, all his power helpless before a red, smiling mouth and eyes blue enough for the gods’ heaven.

“Ganymede,” Erik said.

* * *

“You got the job,” Henry said, sounding more bewildered than he’d any right to when Charles told him. “You got the job and he didn’t eat you alive.”

“Not that I’d have minded it,” Charles said, mostly to see Henry go bright red. He laughed while Henry spluttered and devoted himself to finding something to eat; the walk back to his rooms on the via dell’Agnolo from the Mercato Vecchio had been brisk, partly to avoid any unpleasant encounters but mostly because Charles was in quite a good mood.

“So when do you go back?” Henry asked. He had gone into his own room. “He’s got his… well, you know, their rituals tonight.”

“Sabbath, Henry,” Charles answered through a mouthful of staleish bread he’d dug out of a cupboard. “I told him I would come Sunday, but he insisted I go to church.” He sighed. “I probably should, the saints know I haven’t confessed properly in ages.”

“Maybe you should.” Henry slunk out of his room, dressed as if to go out. The libraries, perhaps, or an appointment with one of the scholars from the university. 

“As if you’re one to talk!”

“We did come here to study and learn,” Henry said with his usual aggravating earnestness. Henry’s interests had always run toward architecture and engineering, less so the body. Although he was a handful of years younger than Charles, he managed to project the sort of disapproval Charles associated with someone decades older. Namely, Charles thought, his stepfather.

“And we are learning,” Charles replied. “Just… rather different things.”

Henry regarded him skeptically for a moment, seeming to balance on the edge of saying something, before sighing resignedly and walking out. The door swung shut behind him, and the faint echo of footsteps down the stairs vanished as Henry did. Grinning to himself, Charles headed for his own room and his bed, and imagined the look on Henry’s face should Charles have told him of the thoughts that crossed his mind seeing Lehnsherr for the first time, or the thrill up his spine when those pale eyes had fixed on him as if to, as Henry had said, devour him.

* * *

Angel thumped him down in a rickety chair set before a bit of mirror and a table. The table had been laid with a brush and comb and a few pots of cosmetics. “Not that we’ll need the rouge,” Angel had decided after taking a look at him and tugging at his hair. Her accomplice, a silent man whom Angel had introduced as Janos, looked on.

“Ow.” Charles winced. “Is this really…”

“The point is that you ought to be artfully disheveled, not looking like you just rolled out of bed.” Angel tugged again and made an impatient noise. “Stay still.”

Angel was dark fire—a Judith, Charles thought, one of the versions in which she was a young bride, the most beautiful of the Hebrew women brought as a prize to Holofernes’ bed. As she began to pull the brush and comb through Charles’s hair, Charles decided the comparison was apt; it was either try to go with the motion as she tried to discipline his unruly curls, or have his head pulled off his neck. Occasionally Janos would mutter something to Angel, who would huff and try another strategy.

Mercifully, Lehnsherr stalking in interrupted the torture.

“Leave it,” he instructed, fixing both of them with a scowl that faltered when he saw the robe Charles was wearing had, due to Angel’s ministrations, slipped off his shoulder. “Ganymede was a shepherd; he was hardly doing up his hair before going out to tend the sheep.”

“That would have been nice to know earlier,” Angel said sarcastically. She added, a bit more deference this time, “Janos has your pencils laid out for the cartoon, if you’re starting that today? Or just figure studies?”

“Figure studies first, I think,” Lehnsherr said. He gestured to Charles and then to the couch in the center of the studio. “If you would?”

“Gladly.” Charles slipped out of his robe unceremoniously. The pressure of Lehnsherr’s gaze on him, evaluating, hungry, sharp as teeth sinking into him (and wasn’t that a lovely thought?) replaced the light pressure of the fabric. It brought its own kind of heat separate from the sunlight flooding in under the loggia that looked out over the courtyard. Charles was not inexperienced in this, and he knew from the tension in Lehnsherr’s broad shoulders, how he suddenly turned away to busy himself with his pencils and paper, that Lehnsherr wanted, and had wanted since their first meeting.

He arranged himself on the couch, one arm along the low back, the other dangling so his fingers brushed the cool tile of the floor. After some hesitation he drew up one knee slightly, bracing his foot against the cushion.

Lehnsherr breathed in and out once, harshly.

“Will this do?” Charles asked.

Lehnsherr drew close, bending over him. An eagle stooping over its prey, like Jupiter in truth, Charles imagined, his grey eyes as divinely implacable and hungry. His lips parted, in the inner lining moist and flushed as if Lehnsherr had been licking or biting at them.

When Lehnsherr touched him, it was to run a quick, ungentle hand through Charles’s curls, disheveling them even more. The touch was there and gone, forceful still, pushing Charles’s head back with the motion, as if Lehnsherr refused to allow himself to linger.

“Windblown,” Lensherr said roughly. His eyes were dark, a ring of silver around the black of his pupil. “You were just rapt up to heaven, Charles.”

He turned and went back to his easel, and Charles fell back, his own breath quick, dazed, his heartbeat racketing as if, as Lehnsherr said, he’d found himself caught and pulled up into the sky.


	4. In the Westwood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fae have no love of iron, which disappoints Erik. He would love to bring swords and armor to lay at Charles’s feet, misericordes too—slim and elegant but powerful, like Charles himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Charles is a fae and Erik is a raven-shapeshifter. There is a lot of not-explicit/not-graphic nudity and a possible warning for underage characters (in human years they are 80ish, but in fae years they're like fourteen or fifteen and basically look like teenagers).
> 
> Inspired by and written for [synekdokee](http://synekdokee.tumblr.com/), who drew [this completely lovely](http://synekdokee.tumblr.com/post/42550001271/faerie-charles-and-erik-the-shape-shifting-raven) picture of Charles as a fae and Erik as a shapeshifter. The first two parts of this were posted [on my Tumblr](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/42600977754/synekdokee-theletteraesc-synekdokee); the third, "Moira," is all-new.

**Erik**

The fae have no love of iron, which disappoints Erik. He would love to bring swords and armor to lay at Charles’s feet, misericordes too—slim and elegant but powerful, like Charles himself.

As it is, he has more than enough, and it’s easier to steal small things in his bird form. Besides, Erik thinks as he picks up the long silver chain, making sure he’s looped it well enough so it won’t tangle or catch on anything in his flight, small things accentuate the strength in Charles’s bones or the deceptively fragile-seeming curve of his neck.

The lady who owns this necklace—and the sapphire ring Erik has clutched in his beak—will doubtless miss it, but the necklace and the ring will look much better gracing Charles than her.

When Erik lands, and the brush of his wing against Charles’s cheek turns to the brush of fingers, Charles will turn, a sweetly welcoming smile curving his lips. The day he’s spent in the summer sun will have brought out a few more of his freckles and the clear azure of his eyes. The sapphire will be a pale shadow of that blueness as Charles slips the ring on his little finger and holds it close to his face to study it. And he will stay still as Erik deftly loops the long chain over the sturdy, curving bone of his horns and admires how it lies against the brown curl of Charles’s hair.

 

**Emma**

They really are almost too adorable.

Emma has less than no interest in adolescent courtship rituals. The elder fae, as a rule, have little interest in the adolescents in general. It’s such a tedious age for anyone who’s grown out of it. As regent, she has marginally more interest in Charles than his mother ever had, but her interest can be satisfied by ensuring he remains safe within the kingdom’s wards. For the rest, he runs as wild as the other fae children, and there will be time enough once he passes his hundredth summer to harness that easily-enraptured attention and bend it to his studies.

As for Erik… his training as the Raven-Sword is well underway, if only because his shifting skills aid him on his frequent trips to steal baubles from the mortal keeps beyond the forest. Emma rolls her eyes, watching as Erik carefully clasps a gold-and-ruby collar about Charles’s throat, his fingers pausing to linger on sun-warm skin before withdrawing. He’s more obsessive than even most of the younger fae, who are known (and intolerable) for their ability to spend a whole season studying one tree to learn the change of its leaves.

Charles and the forest will have a fierce protector one day, if Erik doesn’t let his heart trip him up too much. Satisfied that her charge is safe, and thoroughly sick of adolescent infatuation, Emma wills herself away.

* * *

Charles is remembering a long poem Armando had once told him. The river-spirit has many songs that he's overheard from the mortals who sail his waters, and he passes on to Charles the ones he thinks Charles will enjoy. He reaches the part about the hero setting foot on the shores of his homeland as Erik presses the clasp of the collar shut.

“Do you like it?” Erik asks, rocking back on his heels.

“It’s lovely,” Charles says with a smile that makes Erik’s thin, wind-chapped lips tilt up at the corners. Truthfully, Charles would much rather look at Erik than at the jewelry, the sun-licked breadth of his shoulders, the hints of copper in his hair and the long, houndish muscle of his torso, all with an attraction Charles finds stronger than even the pretty mortal things Erik brings him. He could study Erik all day, he thinks, and all night—throughout the hours, studying how the sunlight and moonlight across Erik’s strong cheekbones and jaw.

“I can get you more,” Erik says. He tenses to rise, his energy gathering about him as he prepares to shift; Charles sees it as eddies in the air, gathering around Erik like a cloak. “Shall I—”

“No!” Charles’s hand darts out to close around the strong circumference of Erik’s wrist. Erik tenses, a wild thing sensing itself caged before he submits himself, proud as a hawk, to Charles’s restraint.

“I should like it if you’d stay with me,” Charles says, once Erik’s cool grey eyes have focused on him again. He casts about for a reason to keep Erik by him that is not completely embarrassing. “… I could recite a poem for you? It’s quite beautiful, even if it’s mortal.”

For a wonder, Erik settles himself, his back to the old river so he can look at Charles as he begins the poem, his toe brushing at the dirt-braceleted bone of Charles’ ankle.

 

**Moira**

Charles is roaming the borders of the realm, skirting rather too close to the boundary stones than he ought. His talents have developed rapidly of late, meaning he can walk where the eyes of the White Queen can't see. A sign he is the Summer King in truth, tradition and the poets say, but at the moment Charles finds he likes using it for purposes other than kingly. Besides, Erik and the others training to defend their realm journey to the outer world all the time, and it strikes Charles as deeply unfair that he should be expected to stay sheltered in the heart of the Westwood.

The boundary stones are his new fascination, sparked from Erik's description of one he had perched on while watching a small troop of mortals fearfully traveling the edges of the forest. It dismays Charles that the mortals view their forest as a place of darkness and fear, when its loveliness escapes the words of even the most skillful faeish poets. When he finds a stone he hasn't yet seen, though, he senses the power of the warding spells sunk into it and he thinks he understands why the mortals avoid this as a place of ill-omen; uneasiness prickles up his neck,

He turns, sensing a reason for that unease beyond the magic of the stones.

Watching him, standing in the very skirts of the Westwood, is a girl. She is slim and pale, in a dress that looks as if it might once have been fine, but is now mostly mud with a long tear that shows muddy white underskirts. Like Charles's, her feet are bare; like Charles's must be, her eyes are dark and wide with shock.

"Hello," Charles says, unable to keep from smiling. He steps closer, a little disappointed when the girl moves away from him. Her arms are clasped around her chest, clutching a small object to herself. Charles stops, and the girl stops too.

Charles dips his head politely. The chains and silver charms Erik's decorated him with chime faintly as they swing together. The girl nods, a quick, jerky movement that suggests more nervousness than disrespect.

"You're a mortal, aren't you?" Charles asks.

"Oh," the girl says, going even redder under her sunburn. Her eyes flicker down his body before skipping guiltily back up to his face. "You're..."

"I'm what?" he asks. He looks down at himself and finds everything as it should be, pale skin and wiry arms and legs, soft strands of grass poking up from between his toes.

She's staring at his face with great intensity, as if the rest of him doesn't exist, her cheeks going redder by the minute. Charles thinks back over everything Erik, Emma, and the others have told him about mortals and then he remembers that mortals are not accustomed to going about unclothed. Unlike the heart of the Westwood, their world experiences the shocks of _cold_ and _snow_ and rains that are fiercer than the sunshowers of his home. The elders wear clothes and very young children, and Charles will be expected to wear them once he has to settle down for studies, but the youth among the fae go unclothed more often than not.

Maybe, Charles supposes, she's worried for him. Or maybe... Erik had told him of strange mortal customs regarding the naked body. It was not, Erik had said scornfully, for display. Deciding this must be it, Charles hops up on a small stone and folds in on himself, legs crossed and knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped about them to keep them close. The girl seems to relax, although she carefully keeps her gaze above his tucked-up knees.

"I'm Moira," the girl says at last. "You're... You have _horns_. Are you a devil?"

 _Devil_ sounds unwholesome, one of the dark spirits that infested Southshaw before Charles's father drove them out. They had been relations, although distant and very unpleasant.

"Ljosalfr," Charles corrects, remembering the mortal word for their people. Erik, were he here, would have been mortally offended to be confused with a _svartalfr_. They merely call themselves _the people_ , but Moira is not to know that. He adds, because Moira has trusted him with her name, unknowing of the power it gives him, "You may call me Uisge."

"Is that your name?" Moira asks. Her green-brown eyes are quite shrewd, altogether too shrewd for a mortal child. Charles remembers how much shorter the day-spans of mortals are; Moira has seen perhaps eleven summers pass.

"No," he admits, "but it is good enough to call me by." He does not add that she must call him three times, and even then, the Summer King is not bound to answer any summons.

"It's good to meet you." Moira settles herself on another rock, nearly close enough to touch. "Are your horns real?"

"Quite real," he says, and bends his head so she can touch them. When he does so, he notices again the strange burden she carries, kept close to her body as if it's precious.

"What's that?" He reaches for the object she's tucked under her arm so one hand could touch his horn. It's a small squarish thing decorated with bits of metal, boards covered with leather and enclosing thin sheets of some material Charles has never seen.

"It's a book, silly," Moira says. "Haven't you ever seen one?"

"A book?" His mouth shapes itself clumsily to the new word. "May I see it?"

* * *

Charles, like any other young fae, is intense in his attentions and willful to the point of foolishness in his pursuit of them. Most of the time Erik finds this unreasonably attractive but, now that he's discovered Charles has been sneaking off during Erik's Sword training to meet with a _mortal_ , Erik curses it fervently.

"She's not _any_ mortal," Charles snaps in reply to Erik's accusation. He draws himself up, no longer the sun-freckled, tousle-haired boy but every inch the Summer King, and the Sword-bred part of Erik clamors at him to yield to his lord's displeasure. Charles continues, rather more petulantly than authoritatively, "She's _Moira_ , and she's been teaching me to read."

" _What?_ " Emma would destroy half the Westwood with her displeasure, and then dispatch banshees to the mortal girl's keep to terrify the mortals to death. _Words_. Mortals are inferior in nearly all ways to the fae, but they have some ability of their own, not only with iron but with some power that allows them to capture magic in ink and symbols. Erik has seen these things, _books_ , in the places where mortals worship and leave trinkets for a god who doesn't appreciate them. "My lord!"

Charles flinches at the title but squares his shoulders and fixes Erik with a steady gaze. "There is no evil in it, Erik, truly. I haven't told her my true name..."

"Will you?" Cold fear seizes Erik's heart.

There are stories, few and far between, but the fae have long memories that do not fade. A handful of them have lost their hearts to mortal lovers, either through love or foolishness or both. Mortals are greedy, and once they have a fae's true name they will devour his very spirit, feeding their short lives upon it until they die and the fae, in grief or madness, pines away. It is one of the few ways a fae can die. Erik imagines Charles binding himself to this girl, _Moira_ , and surely if he left, pulled away by the chains that shackled him to her, the light in the Westwood would fade and go out--

"Oh no, no, no." Charles has stepped up to Erik, so very close, his warm hands cupped around Erik's cheeks. "Erik, Erik my love, please, that will not happen, I swear it."

His mentor, Howlett, says he will be one of the greatest Swords in a generation, fearless but not stupid with it, and once he grows into his shoulders and has enough muscle to swing a sword properly, no mortal or Southshaw spirit will dare match themselves against him. Right now, though, he is young and frightened, and furious with himself for being so, yet with his mind unmoored and drifting through a future he had never imagined and only Charles pressed close to him to prevent him from becoming lost.

"I will not leave you," Charles says, very softly, very firmly. Erik remembers that this is the power of the Summer King, to know what passes through the hearts of his subjects. They aren't bound yet as King and sword, not properly, but Charles's words have the weight of unbreakable chains. He nods, once, Charles's callused fingertips sliding against his cheekbones. Charles says, more softly this time, "Erik, _never_."

And then, as if to seal the vow, Charles's mouth presses against his, warm and solid. His hands keep Erik still, as if Erik would truly flee, as if he would pull away now Charles is sighing into him, tasting of summer and ferocity and the promise that has been building between the two of them. And Erik has his own fingers in Charles's hair, tangling in soft brown locks and delicate chains, brushing the soft curve of his ear and the bony assertion of his horns. Charles shivers deliciously, a shudder of warm flesh all along Erik's chest and belly.

Shifted so abruptly away from fear, all Erik wants is to chase after desire and sensation. He does so, gathering Charles more closely to him for the three more heartbeats they're allowed before Charles pulls away, an urgent _Someone's coming_ flickering through Erik's head. Charles winces, his kiss-swollen mouth twisting wryly. _Emma._

The fae have nothing of the mortal fear of pleasure, although discretion and privacy are preferred. And King or Queen and Sword becoming lovers is not unheard of. The Crown-apparent and his not-yet-Sword, though... the fae have no laws but they do have custom, and Emma is ferocious in seeing that Charles obeys it. Erik knows the reason, with Charles the only heir left after his father's death in the Southshaw and his mother refusing to remarry or even take a lover to guarantee the succession. Still, Erik grumbles a little at Charles electing _now_ , of all times, to do what he's told.

This close, Charles's ability to shield them is uncertain, but it seems to last until they can tumble down to the riverside, to their favorite spot underneath a wide-spreading chestnut. By the time they get there, the possibility of Emma finding out has cooled Erik's ardor, and he can sit a respectful distance from Charles and breathe air that isn't laced through with Charles's scent, and feel as if he's not, after all, coming apart under his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some extra notes: the names for the ljósálfar (light elves) and svartalfar (dark elves) are borrowed from Norse mythology, although they are not intended to be faithful to the elves as Norse myth depicts them. Charles's calling-name, Uisge, is Gaelic for "water," although we know it better as "whiskey."


	5. Beyond the stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She'd give anything to be ten or eleven again, barefoot and racing around the fields in the sunlight, or leaving Jeanette or Isabelle to nap under a tree while she sneaks herself and a book to the forest to meet Uisge by the boundary stone. He is her secret and she keeps him close like she promised him, one of the few left to her by adults who think every little thing about Moira's life is something they ought to know about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: This follows on from [In the Westwood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/674013/chapters/1238508), although it's from Moira's point of view, and you should probably read that one first to know who Uisge is (hint: it's Charles). Moira and Charles friendship with Erik/Charles; implied/non-explicit nudity, arranged marriage or threat thereof; referenced (although not explicit) spousal abuse; referenced death in childbirth.
> 
> I've been re-reading one of my favorite books, Hella Haasse's _In a Dark Wood Wandering_ (which I recommend to everyone), and there are really no words for how much it would have sucked to be born female during certain parts of the Middle Ages. That thought occurred to me (for the millionth time) reading about six-year-old Isabelle of Valois' betrothal to Richard II, and then I started imagining how Moira would not put up with that arranged marriage BS. And then I wrote this.
> 
> As a note, the Westwood stuff is not set anywhere/anywhen in particular, although its society is modeled on France between the 1300-1400s. But if you want historical accuracy or whatever go somewhere else. There are fae in this ffs.

It's been getting harder to sneak away from the keep to read with Uisge. Ever since Jeanette had detected the first hints of a change in Moira's body, she'd gone running to Moira's mother and now trips outside the keep walls have to be made only when Moira thinks she can get away with it.

She'd give anything to be ten or eleven again, barefoot and racing around the fields in the sunlight, or leaving Jeanette or Isabelle to nap under a tree while she sneaks herself and a book to the forest to meet Uisge by the boundary stone. He is her secret and she keeps him close like she promised him, one of the few secrets left to her by adults who think every little thing in Moira's life is something they ought to know about.

Barely eight months past her first bleeding, her father summons her to his study to tell her he's found a husband for her. She wishes she could have received this news in any other room, not the room where she would sit on her father's lap or play toy horses on the carpet while he worked. He thinks it's a surprise, but Moira has ears and eyes of her own, and they're more than quick enough to tell her about the messages and presents that have been coming from Comte William since last summer.

"So modest!" he laughs when she lowers her gaze to the flagstones, although really, she hides her blush out of embarrassment. Moira wonders how he found out, if her mother told him or one of the ladies-in-waiting, or worse, if he'd worked it out on his own. "There, there, my pet," her father says. He tousles her hair the way he used to when she was five. "Won't you like to be a grand lady in charge of your own house, and to go to court to see the king, and not be stuck here with your boring old parents?"

"I would rather stay here." Moira bites her lip and prays she won't cry. Alongside the fear of marriage is the thought that she won't see Uisge or the forest again.

"Now, my love," her father says, "you must trust me to know what's best for you. Can you smile for me?" The expression Moira musters up doesn't feel like a smile, but it seems to satisfy her father. "There are those lovely eyes! Now, run up to your room and there'll be a surprise for you there, I wager. Something pretty for the betrothal feast next week."

The knowledge is a terrible weight to carry around for the next seven days. Moira can't bring herself to go down to the forest, too afraid she'll cry in front of Uisge, like a little girl instead of the woman she's supposed to be. Even worse would be Uisge's mysterious power that lets him know what she's thinking when she doesn't even speak, seeing the images in her head that make her shudder to imagine anyone discovering. Strangely, she's more afraid of crying in front of Aile, who may be a raven but is still judgmental.

On the night of the feast, the dress is a terrible weight all its own, a ton of velvet and silk, as Jeanette ties her into it. The mirror shows her as a small pale girl swallowed up in green and gold, her eyes staring at a sight that terrifies her more with each passing moment. Jeanette begins to fix up her hair, muttering imprecations as she fights with the day's tangles – "How do you get yourself in such a state, my little miss?" – and begins to plait it with ribbons. Isabelle ducks in to fasten one of Comte William's presents around her neck, a chain with a bird pendant, its eye a glittering emerald. It rests like a dead thing between Moira's collar bones.

"What a pretty little lady," Isabelle says, but the look she exchanges with Jeanette over the top of Moira's head says something else entirely.

It says _poor girl_.

Moira's ears and eyes are also quick enough to pick up the stories about Comte William. He is almost twenty years her elder, hardened by the wars they fight with their bitter enemies to the north. The childbed took his first wife but left him a son, a sickly boy barely four years younger than Moira herself. (It occurs to her, freezing her belly before she can push the thought away, that she will be expected to be a mother to him; she will be a step-mother.)When she had told Uisge that people said the fairies had taken the comte's true son and put a changeling in his place, Uisge had laughed and said it didn't work that way; the fae had enough healthy babies of their own that they didn't need to go around stealing mortal ones.

Other whispers are softer, oblique, or the words remain unspoken. Moira has heard her mother arguing with her father, saying "Surely there is someone more suitable" and proposing alternatives her father rejects. Comte William will bring the family prestige and power, give her father the voice in the royal court that his current obscurity denies him. Moira's children will have access to the power and influence he himself can only dream of, and to territories that Comte William's sword has brought under their sway.

"If she lives to enjoy it," her mother had replied.

"Poor woman gave up, they say," Jeanette had said one day while the ladies-and-waiting dozed over their knitting. "Black and blue she was under her bodice, or so Femette – she was the Comtesse Christine's waiting gentlewoman, you know – so she tells me one day. She'll take over for young Miss Moira, if his lordship don't send me with her."

Now, Jeanette steps back and claps her hands. "Aren't you lovely, my dear? Isabelle, look."

"Quite lovely," Isabelle says before reminding Jeanette of the time. The guests have been here – Moira had spied on them while they were arriving earlier in the day, Comte William riding at the head of his entourage on a grey charger – and the keep seems full to bursting with strangers.

She wishes Uisge were here, her wild boy who devours the books she brings him and asks questions until a fourteen-year-old girl's vast knowledge of the world is nearly exhausted. He is her only friend, if a fae can be called so, a strange boy the only companion to a girl left brotherless by disease and surrounded by grownups. Even though she knows the thoughts are dangerous, and Uisge is probably a demon sent to tempt her from the path to Heaven and Uisge is certainly not for owning, she can't help but think of him as hers.

Not, she reminds herself, in the way Comte William already thinks of her as _his_ , toasting her with his glass, malachite and silver with her family's crest stamped on it. He's paid endless courtesies to her throughout the feast and made her gifts of a pretty greyhound and a horse and a falcon – "Your father says you like hunting" – but his eyes glitter in a way Moira dislikes. All the warmth on his face is from wine; it reaches no deeper than the flush in his cheeks and a smile that shows more teeth than joy. It isn't like Uisge's smiles, which are always quick and teasing, or her mother's, which are sweet.

"Father," she begins. She wants to continue with _I don't want to marry him, please don't make me_ , but what she says is, "May I be excused? I have a headache."

"Too much excitement," her mother adds in with a speaking look adults think children don't understand, "and it's getting late."

Comte William bows over her hand when she curtsies to him. The hair on the top of his head is thinning. Moira shivers.

Jeanette takes her back down the long halls of the keep to her room. Moira wishes she were back in the nursery, the snug little tower she'd shared with her older brother before he'd taken ill three winters ago and passed. So much wishing tonight! she thinks. Maybe she should be done with wishing.

By the time she manages to get rid of Jeanette, she's formed a plan. Once she hears Jeanette's snores in the next room – it takes entirely too long – she puts her plan into action.

Moira's read the romances and heard the poets telling them, and rather more boringly, the saints' lives her mother reads to her on Sundays. Noble ladies finding themselves faced with unwanted marriage or the importunities of an unwanted lover always flee to convents, claiming Jesus as their true spouse above any mortal husband. Or they set their prospective husband some impossible task to get rid of him, or they kill themselves. Moira would prefer not to die, either by her own hand or Comte William's.

There is also a tale of a lady married to an evil old man who locked her in a tower. She prayed to God to send her someone who should love her and not the possession of her. Then one day a tawny hawk flew through her window and changed and became a beautiful young man. He told her he had loved her from afar for so long, and any time she wished his company she would need only wish for him and he would come.

The hawk lover ended up dying, trapped and killed by the evil husband, but Moira is not locked in a tower, and she has no evil husband yet.

She takes only her cloak and her mother's ring with her, and the book she has hidden to take down to Uisge. The halls echo emptily, filled only with her quiet footsteps and woodsmoke from the fire in the great hall. One of the kitchen dogs gnaws on a bone, too busy with it to bother with Moira.

The path from the side door through the yard of the keep to the postern gate stretches on, an interminable length of shadow and starlight and soft noises that make Moira jump. She bites her lip against a scream when a mouse scuttles nearly underfoot, dancing around it and nearly falling before she can catch her balance. When her fear-numbed fingers finally manage the latch on the gate, the hinges scream as if to wake Hell itself. Moira makes herself as small as she can and squeezes through.

High overhead the moon's eye watches her as she pelts across the field. She trips in the new-plowed furrows, her feet sinking into the dirt, already chilled through her thin shoes from the early spring. The air burns in her lungs, bad air, Jeanette would say. She'll catch her death, but she doesn't want to stop to pull her cloak around herself. It streams out behind her instead.

Finally, gasping and shaking, she reaches the boundary stone. At night the sense of fear about the place is stronger, every nocturnal rustle more threatening, unseen eyes watching her from the wall of shadow that lies beyond where the path stops. No one goes past the stone, or at least, no one in recent memory. Even in the daylight there is a mist or a fog if you look too closely.

Moira steels herself and steps up to the boundary stone. It is a thing of even darker omen in the night time than in the day, wearing moss like a beard around the staring face carved in the apex. No one knows what the face means, or the carvings that look like letters. Uisge won't discuss them. A fog creeps in about her ankles, twining around them like a cat. When she breathes out, it puffs away from her before seeping in again.

"Uisge?" she asks. Her voice is so very loud and the forest waits in its silence. She repeats the name twice more, "Uisge, Uisge," and adds a silent wish at the end.

He comes, companioned by Aile the raven, who always rides on his shoulder. Moira is convinced Aile doesn't like her much, although Uisge merely assures her that Aile is stubborn and mistrustful and it's nothing to do with her. While she and Uisge read, Aile will perch on the boundary stone and watch her haughtily the entire time, more like one of the falcons in the aviary than any raven Moira's ever seen.

Uisge comes, naked as always, and unbothered by the cold. The moonlight glints off his hair, the dark pools of his eyes and his pale skin, and the chains and bits of metal that decorate his horns. Those, and sometimes leaves or flowers, are the only things he wears. Along with more embarrassing changes in her body, Moira has begun to notice _him_ , in ways that call up heat in her belly and make her heart go quickly.

"Moira?" Uisge asks. Dew beads along his curls like tiny jewels. "What are you doing out here?"

"I'm going to run away." She tells him the rest of the story, hurrying through the explanation Uisge demands concerning how her father can force her to marry a man she cares nothing for. Aile croaks contemptuously, shifting on Uisge's shoulder.

"Where will you go?" Uisge asks. He hasn't folded himself up onto his usual rock, but instead has taken one of her hands in his. They rarely touch, although they sit close so they can read along together. Uisge's skin is always so warm, as if sunlight has been captured beneath it.

"Either to a convent," Aile caws again and Moira frowns at him, "or I will come with you."

Her heart thumps once, hard, as she says it.

Uisge looks at her. She raises her chin and meets his gaze squarely, fearlessly, the way custom won't let her meet Comte William's.

"I should hate to see you leave," Uisge says at last. He has a lovely voice, bright and musical even when it's sad. "And I should hate to have you walled up like that. Aile has told me stories."

Fear-excitement shivers through her even as Uisge says, "But understand this, Moira… if you come with me, you can never go home." He nods to the distant keep and the fields. "If you step beyond this stone again, to the mortal side, the Westwood will be lost to you forever, no matter how much you miss the ones you love, no matter how much you may yearn to see them again. Do you understand?"

"I do," Moira says.

With a shrill cry, Aile launches himself off Uisge's shoulder. Moira expects him to fly away in a bird tantrum, or to perch on the boundary stone again, but instead, between one eye-twisting moment and another, Aile vanishes and is replaced by another boy, tall and lanky and also naked, wearing only a gold band around his right ankle, like the anklet Aile wears.

"This," the boy growls, "is absolutely unacceptable."

"I believe you've registered your disapproval already," Uisge says, dryly but with a certain impatience.

"She's a _mortal_ ," the boy, Aile, replies, pointing at Moira as if making an accusation. His voice is deeper than Uisge's; he looks older and, as he begins to pace the clearing, moves like her father's foot soldiers with a grace that bespeaks deadly precision. "Do I need to remind you of the danger if they suspect us? If her family comes looking for her? Or the fact that you're not the Summer King yet?"

"Yet." Uisge is shorter than Aile, but in this moment he seems to overmatch him. Moira knows a very little about Uisge from the few things he's mentioned about himself, that he is royalty and that his tutor, Emma, is a cruel tyrant who doesn't want Uisge to have any fun. When she sees him, he is always a slim boy with freckles dusting his face and shoulders and arms, gangly because he hasn't grown into himself yet.

Now, she sees something rather different. It's one thing, she thinks, to know someone is another thing entirely from what they seem to be, and another to see it. This isn't the boy who has devoured books in English and French and has pestered her to teach him Latin, or laughs at the inaccuracies about the fae in the romances he reads. Now he wears power more effortlessly than Comte William, the night air around him is filled with it.

"I do have the right, Aile," Uisge says, "and I have the ability to keep us safe."

"That is my responsibility," Aile mutters. He steps closer, ducking his head in something that would be submission in any other creature. "My lord."

Uisge says something Moira can't decipher and touches Aile's face. Aile turns into the touch, eyes sliding shut, a sigh shaking some of the tension from his shoulders. _We keep each other, and all of us, safe_ , she thinks Uisge says next, and thinks she should look away, that this isn't something meant to be seen.

Quickly, though, Uisge steps back and Aile turns to favor her with an expression of cool scorn. She's used to it from his bird form – and really, Moira thinks, she should be more surprised that she's willingly stepped straight into one of her stories, with a fae and his raven-boy companion – so she ignores it. Aile grumbles, "If you are truly willing to go through with this madness, you'll have to answer to Emma. When she takes it out of your hide, don't blame me."

"Aile is exaggerating," Uisge says, although his tone is affectionate. He looks at Aile the way Moira's mother looks at her father, but the affection slides away quickly when Uisge adds, "Now, Moira, have you decided?"

She tightens her grip on her book, and wishes she might have said goodbye to her parents or left a note. _You can't_ , she reminds herself. _You can only wish them well._

"I have," she tells him.

"Then take my hand," Uisge says.

Aile transforms into his raven-self in a blur of starlight and shadow, alighting on Uisge's shoulder. He glares at Moira -- she has the sense of frowning disapproval – before tugging irritably at one of the chains dangling from Charles's horns and preening a wayward lock of hair.

"You must not let go," Uisge tells her firmly, a flicker of command in the words to impress them into her bones. Moira nods, swallowing. This is it; even knowing her decision, fear gnaws at her, the fear of a girl who's decided to step over the cliff and fears only what waits far below. "The fog will take us, and you won't be able to see," Uisge continues, "but I can, and I won't forsake you. And on the other side, it will be daylight again."

"Will it hurt?" Moira asks. With her free hand she presses her book to her chest as if it's armor.

"No, my dear," Uisge says. He sounds very old, far older than the teenaged shape he wears., and more powerful. Aile chuckles and flaps his wings. "Come, follow me."

He steps into the wall of silver cloud. Aile is a dark shape hovering in the silver and then nothing. Uisge's hand is firm and warm around Moira's.

Moira breathes in once for courage and steps beyond the stone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Names:
> 
> Uisge = Gaelic, "water" (or 'whiskey' as we know it)  
> Aile = Manx, "fire" (Aile is the name Erik uses when around mortals)


	6. Callipygy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boy returned to the city and, not being under any kind of prohibition, immediately proceeded to tell _everyone_ about how Charles’s buttocks were the most firmly-fleshed, pale, glorious, perfect things he had ever seen. Erik nearly choked with outrage (and maybe a bit of jealousy) thinking about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Inspired by [Syn](http://synekdokee), who posted [this](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43227992806/synekdokee-angrybagel-did-u-know-that-the). Charles and Erik are gods in a culture that I have shamelessly ripped off from ancient Greece. Jealous!Erik with a side of pouting, insufferable smugness on Charles's part, literal body worship.
> 
> _Callipygy_ refers to the quality of having a very nice ass.

“It’s idiotic,” Erik said before stomping off to his own temple. He tried not resent the fact that Charles didn't follow him.

Thunder rang through the otherwise-clear skies, startling the mortals below. Good, Erik thought. Maybe they would take it for a bad omen and demolish the temple rather than finish dedicating it.

A temple dedicated to a god’s power was proper, fitting, an acknowledgment of his divine authority. Especially the great temple on the peninsula dedicated to Erik Ironwielder, with its spoils of war taken from distant lands to decorate the walls and the swords and axes, crafted by the city’s master smith, used to sacrifice the victims on the high altar. That was fine. Erik liked to spend time there, although human weapons naturally fell short of his divinely-forged ones, the ones he made with his own hands.

But then a few years ago the prince of the city had got it into his head to build a new temple, this one to secure the patronage and protection of Charles, the god of wisdom. The prince and the city’s nobility put up money for the best sculptors and painters in the islands to come and decorate the temple, which they had commissioned the best architect in the east to design.

That on its own was all well and good, and Erik understood the mortals' reason. The city-state had secured its preeminence in the east following a long and bloody conflict, and now its citizens had stability and security, they had decided to get themselves some culture by founding an academy. This meant they would need a temple dedicated to Charles as the patron god of learning.

And _that_ was all well and good.

Until one day a local youth had been out hunting and stumbled across Charles while he’d been bathing in a pleasant spring.

Instead of turning the boy into a deer to be devoured by his own hounds for his presumption in staring at a god’s naked body, Charles had smiled and asked the boy to hand him his towel. He had probably not even hurried about covering up, Erik thought grumpily.

The boy returned to the city and, not being under any kind of prohibition, immediately proceeded to tell _everyone_ about how Charles’s buttocks were the most firmly-fleshed, pale, glorious, perfect things he had ever seen. Erik nearly choked with outrage (and maybe a bit of jealousy) thinking about it. Then the poets had got hold of the boy’s story and started writing hymns, a playwright had begun to compose a play for the next dramatic festival, and the city fathers decided that, instead of dedicating the new temple to Charles All-Seer Who Knows the Hearts of Men, they would dedicate it to Charles the Lovely-Buttocked.

Unfortunately, the academy had not objected. In fact, they had approved because they figured Charles the Lovely-Buttocked would attract more people, and thus more money, than Charles the Far-Thinking.

“Really, darling, one can’t be serious all the time.” Charles appeared by Erik’s side, regretfully covered up, although Erik did appreciate he had his chiton hiked up indecently high on his thighs. Charles’s grin told Erik he had of course overheard that thought; Charles was a shameless eavesdropper.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to look at you,” Erik grumbled. He thought about flying up to the gods’ mountain and sulking while Charles went to the dedication feast and admired the statues of himself. Because of course the sculptors had changed their commission, and instead of _Charles in Contemplation_ or _Charles Instructing the Philosophers_ , they had sculpted _Charles Admiring His Own Backside_ and _Charles Exiting the Bath_.

“Besides, it’s completely idiotic and _mortal_ , obsessing over something that ridiculous,” Erik added, choosing to ignore the fact that he had spent many, many hours doing pretty much the same thing.

“That’s not what you called my arse last night,” Charles said with an evil smirk. “And anyway, I don’t hear you complaining about all those epithets like _Erik the flashing-eyed whose footsteps are like thunder_ or _broad-shouldered Erik with the narrow waist_ , or whatever.”

“That’s different,” Erik said weakly. “At least they don’t have temples especially for my shoulders.”

“Maybe you should let a mortal see you naked then,” Charles said. He leaned up to kiss Erik on the cheek, breath sweet with ambrosia and wine. “Come on, come with me to the dedication feast, and after I’ll let you worship me properly.”

“Very well,” Erik said, readying himself to fly. “But don’t expect me to sing any hymns.”


	7. Authority kink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe he would swallow like that, watching Erik take him all the way in, maybe he’d breathe out hard, a sigh that would gust across the top of Erik’s head, maybe he’d swallow around a choked-off _good boy_ when Erik tongued him exactly right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: AU (still with powers), telepathic eavesdropping, professor/student relationship, authority kink, Charles being a smug and unethical bastard, referenced bondage/mild BDSM, dirty talk/humiliation
> 
> For [yet another amazing piece of art](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43244696875/palalife-on-the-desk-table-is-one-of-my-all) by [Pala](http://palalife.tumblr.com)! This is less cute than the others :>

Nearly every day Erik curses and gives thanks for the fact that he'd been putting off his interdisciplinary advanced lab until his last term of coursework. Often, when he's watching Professor Xavier pacing around in front of the projector, gesturing his way through an algorithm, he does both. Judging from the looks on his classmates' faces, vacant with a glaze of admiration on top, Erik's willing to bet that no one has ever appreciated the Seminar in Bioinformatics quite this way before.

Although really, he's appreciating Professor Xavier's very pretty mouth and how his hair is tousled from running his fingers through it, and remembering the time he'd been out for a jog and seen Professor Xavier loping along in running shorts that had done extremely nice things to his thighs. From there his mind segues into those thighs bracketing his head as Erik kneels between them, unzipping those ridiculous khakis and reaching in, Professor Xavier's fingers in his hair to encourage him...

At the front of the seminar room, Professor Xavier coughs and shakes his head. He drinks from his water bottle, mobile flesh of his throat flexing as he swallows, before continuing. Maybe he would swallow like that, watching Erik take him all the way in, maybe he'd breathe out hard, a sigh that would gust across the top of Erik's head, maybe he'd swallow around a choked-off  _good boy_ when Erik tongued him exactly right.

Wait, lecture. Erik manages to catch the end of it, almost too relieved that Professor Xavier wears a telepathy limiter (and so has not overheard, or overseen, or whatever) to catch the homework--and, for that matter, almost too relieved to remember to sit down until he could walk without it being completely indecent.

A few students try to monopolize Professor Xavier's time after class, but he escapes from them--and Erik--with surprising ease. Erik, on edge and a bit stunned at himself for missing fifteen minutes of lecture because of fantasy blowjobs, doesn't have the chance to follow him.

So it's a bit surprising when, thirty minutes later, his phone pings with a new email message.

> _Erik,_
> 
> _Could you please see me at any point convenient this afternoon about today's class? I'll be in my office until five._
> 
> _Charles_

Maybe it's Erik's authority kink, but he can't quite square  _Charles_ with  _Professor Xavier_. At least, when his daydreams have him being fucked over a lab bench or tied up so he can have terrible things done to him in his shared office space, it's always  _yes, sir, Professor_ or  _please fuck me, Professor_ that he says.

And maybe it's a sign of how fucked-up Erik is over his fucking bioinformatics professor, or his bioinformatics professor fucking him, that he has to think to appreciate the full import of the email.

"Fuck," he says, when he does.

He's almost done with his coursework. He'll be working on his qualifying exams and thesis proposal next fall. He has an internship with Raytheon for the summer. He's supposed to be a goddamn  _professional_ , not staring at his instructor with fuck only knows what expression on his face. Professor Xavier is going to be one of the professors writing his final review, and Erik cringes, imagining him typing  _Too busy objectifying professor in class to assimilate new information_.

Well, better get it over with. It's too late to drop, but maybe if Erik apologizes and acts every inch the cool, reserved, doctoral student he is, it'll go okay.

Professor Xavier's TA, a nervous first-year whose name Erik can't be bothered to remember, is perpetually hanging about unless he has lab or Erik is able to scare him away. The same can be said for the clutch of undergrads usually stationed outside Professor Xavier's office, clutching their Foundations in Evolutionary Biology textbooks and ratty spiral-bound notebooks.

None of them are in evidence today, not even the TA, although he does have to toss an icy glare at a student who looks like he might be planning on loitering in the hallway. Erik breathes a sigh of relief at having no witnesses to his humiliation and, steeling himself, knocks on the door.

The very British "Do come in" replies nearly before there's anything to reply to. Erik opens the door.

"Ah, Erik." Professor Xavier smiles up at him. "Thank you so much for coming. If you could...?"

Erik sits automatically. Already every fiber of his wretchedly hormonal being has fixed itself on Professor Xavier, as if he's somehow become magnetic, or iron, and all of Erik, from his blood to his powers to  _everything_ , turns to him as if to turn to true north. Professor Xavier has taken off his cardigan to leave him in only rolled-up shirtsleeves, his collar unbuttoned down to the hollow between his clavicles. Resolutely, Erik keeps his eyes from straying down there.

"I got your message," Erik says unnecessarily. He positions his computer bag strategically on his lap, which brings a smile to Professor Xavier's face.

"Yes, I rather thought you did. Tea?" When Erik declines, Professor Xavier stands to make himself a cup, bending to retrieve a jug of filtered water and to give Erik a  very, very nice view of his ass. The kettle begins to heat and click away, eating into the silence that Professor Xavier seems to be content with. At last, the kettle announces it's finished and Professor Xavier fixes a cup. The milk splashes loudly. Erik swallows.

"Now," Professor Xavier says. He quirks a brow and smiles into the lip of his cup, "I wanted to talk to you about class today."

"Yes," Erik says, and wonders if he should just stammer out an apology and get it over with.

Professor Xavier sets his mug on a small table and stands again, pacing around his desk to stand over Erik, leaning back to brace his weight against the desktop. Objectively, Professor Xavier is rather shorter than Erik, but this close, with Erik sitting and looking up, Professor Xavier's presence swamps him, reduces him. Erik wants to bow his head and look away, but can't.

"It isn't fair to the other students who are in class trying to learn for you to distract your professor's attention like that," Professor Xavier says, quiet but firm.

"I..." Erik stares. _  
_

"Really, Erik," murmurs Professor Xavier, "you daydream about me like _that_ , fucking your face while you moan and beg me for more like the shameless little slut you are, plead with me to come down your throat, and I'm supposed to pretend to ignore it and continue talking about reducing statistical noise in genomic analysis programs? Your classmates came to learn about recent developments in bioinformatics, not watch their professor try not to have an erection for thirty minutes."

"Your..." Erik's still staring; he can't do anything else, trapped by blue eyes and Professor Xavier's mouth saying those words, and by a sudden, terrible realization. "You have a  _limiter_ , you aren't supposed to be able..."  _To read minds, to see what people are thinking._

"Oh, this," Professor Xavier rolls his eyes and detaches the small device from his temple. "It's really just for show; not much good against me I'm afraid." He tosses it in the trash can without looking away from Erik.  _Now, Erik, where were we? You were incredibly discourteous today_.

"Yes, Professor Xavier," Erik says past a throat that's suddenly closed off and a mouth that's gone dry. His entire body clamors at him, excited and embarrassed and hot for it.

 _So anxious_ , Professor Xavier thinks.  _To make amends, perhaps?_ He shifts, spreading his legs and Erik, helpless, aching, trembling, looks and sees the outline of Professor Xavier's cock pressed against the tidy, prim-ironed lines of his khakis.

 _I won't require that you apologize to your classmates_ , Professor Xavier tells him. A hand beckons, square-fingered and capable, the same hand Erik has watched typing out code and imagined taking him apart.

_But come here and make it up to me, the way you imagined today._

Erik kneels between those outspread thighs and, with trembling fingers of his own, reaches for Professor Xavier's belt.

 _Such a good boy_ , Professor Xavier murmurs in Erik's head, fingers already playing through Erik's hair. "Such a good student."

"Yes, sir," Erik murmurs, and leans in.


	8. Authority kink 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Professor Xavier sends Erik off with the taste of come and salt still thick in his mouth, but not before Erik has him licked clean and tucked away. Erik manages it through a haze of throbbing want and impatience, his fingers unsteady with the zipper and his powers not much more use.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Continues from the previous chapter. The same warnings are still in effect: C/E, BDSM references, dirty talk/humiliation, professor/student relationship, authority kink. Add to this: semi-public sex, marking, references to masturbation, payment for sex, spanking, pinching.
> 
> [ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com) and [prof](http://professorofeljay.tumblr.com/) wanted moar, so blame them.

Professor Xavier sends Erik off with the taste of come and salt still thick in his mouth, but not before Erik has him licked clean and tucked away. Erik manages it through a haze of throbbing want and impatience, his fingers unsteady with the zipper and his powers not much more use.

"That's all," Professor Xavier says, and nods at the abandoned computer bag by Erik's chair.

Flushing, Erik picks it up, acutely aware of Professor Xavier's bright blue eyes on him, raking over him shamelessly, proprietarily. For a moment rebellion rises up, because fuck this, he didn't just get on his knees to be blown off like he's nothing. He turns around, intending to make an issue of it, but before he can speak, Professor Xavier gestures him close.

For a moment Erik thinks he'll get a kiss, but Professor Xavier only grins, a diabolical eyebrow quirking as he cups Erik's erection through his jeans, pressing down barely on the sweet side of too painful. 

"If I give you everything you want now," Professor Xavier murmurs as Erik shudders and whimpers, "you won't want to come back."

He dismisses Erik then, delicious pressure falling away as he slides past Erik to resume is place behind his desk. Erik hates him acutely, unrumpled beyond the usual professorial dishevelment while he's left Erik swollen-mouthed and unable to trust his voice. He's pretty sure if he tried to talk it would come out as a fucked-out croak. He imagines bruises on his throat, finger marks on the side of his face where Professor Xavier had held him.

"If you want to torture yourself, go right ahead," Professor Xavier says mildly, "but I do have a meeting with an advisee in five minutes."

Erik leaves, ducking his face into the high collar of his coat but feeling marked and flagrant anyway.

* * *

His willpower lasts all week, desire buried under a ton of lab work for his supervisor and his own research. Professor Xavier runs like a subtext, though, memories of that afternoon arresting Erik in odd moments so his concentration derails and he stares into a space where his knees remember the thin carpet under them and when he swallows he swallows around a thick, heavy weight choking off his air.

In the next week's seminar Professor Xavier takes no notice of him, even when Erik--knowing that the telepathy limiter is nothing more than decorative--thinks as viciously as he can about Professor Xavier fucking Erik in the grad assistants' office, just pushing Erik over a desk and taking him and then pulling out and coming all over Erik's ass so Erik wears his come around all day.

"While you may not think it, stochastic analysis has proven invaluable in mapping all manner of gene expression," Professor Xavier says as he turns off the projector. A few of the students stir preparatory to packing up "For the next couple of weeks, we will be discussing proteomics, specifically protein expressions in X-gene carriers. That's all."

Erik can't bring himself to lurk while Professor Xavier fields questions from those students who are clearly just trying to impress their ways into his bed. With a snarl, he stalks off, shutting the door on a high-pitched giggle and Professor Xavier's low, warm reply.

Late on a Thursday afternoon the GA offices are abandoned, everyone off to drink or collapse into bed. Erik sets up his laptop and takes his frustrations out on the first draft of results for his supervisor.

He doesn't pay much attention to the door opening and shutting, although he does notice the bolt sliding home into the lock.

"Don't," Professor Xavier's voice says. Erik freezes. "Close your eyes."

Erik keeps his eyes slit open, although he can't see more of Professor xavier than a blur in the periphery of his vision. 

"Just because I didn't react," Professor Xavier says idly, "doesn't mean that I didn't hear you thinking about how desperately you needed my cock up your ass. And," Erik jumps as a hand descends on his backside, cracking smartly across it, "I said close your eyes."

Erik's eyes snap shut. In the darkness everything is amplified, the electric pulse of his laptop, the hot, throbbing presence of iron and trace metals and steel watch that is Professor Xavier.

"Because you're such a good boy," the words drip with sarcasm, "I'll give you what's been on your mind all this week. It makes me so happy to know you've thought of me every time you've gotten off... And, oh, when you had four fingers stuffed up that lovely arse of yours? Really, Erik, you're shameless."

A hand between his shoulder blades pushes him down so he's stretched awkwardly across his desk. Erik scrabbles to shove his laptop out of the way and Professor Xavier laughs.

He doesn't get much more than Professor Xavier peeling his jeans and boxers down, and a telepathic command not to touch himself. "I'll take care of you," Professor Xavier promises, and it would almost sound sweet if it weren't for the cold, slick fingers pushing into him. Erik stiffens, fingers clawing at the laminate of the desktop. His ability sinks into the metal pulls on the drawers and the legs, the only things to hold on to.

"It feels like you got up to something this morning," says Professor Xavier. The words are mischievous, boyish, as young as Professor Xavier is supposed to be. "Do you have a dildo at home you pretend is me? Did you play with yourself, imagining all the ways I could torture you? Or," the fingers hook cruelly and Erik moans, hips stuttering into and away from them as Professor Xavier growls, "do you have someone else you give yourself to like this?"

"No," Erik whispers. He wants to open his eyes, turn his head so he can see if Professor Xavier thinks that's the truth or not, but he doesn't dare.

"Only me," Professor Xavier murmurs with satisfaction. A third finger slides in as he plays with Erik's ass, a palm running up and down the curve of it, pushing Erik's shirt higher on his back. A warm mouth lands on his spine, teeth scoring the skin and bone and Professor Xavier rocks against him, pushing him a little further up the desk. "Such an abstemious cockslut, aren't you? No wonder you came to me, begging for it."

"Please." He has one cheek plastered to his desk, the skin and laminate slick with sweat and the humiliated tears he can't keep back. He's burning up, he hurts with it, he's full with three of Professor Xavier's fingers in him and the thumb of his other hand pulling his cheeks apart. His next words come out fragmented. "Please, sir, please fuck me."

"Since you asked so nicely." Professor Xavier's zipper sliding down is a cold shiver across the surface of Erik's abilities and he braces himself, waiting in the darkness and everything under his skin on fire.

Professor Xavier holds him open, an admiring hum and _look how open you are for me_ echoing in Erik's head. Only me, Professor Xavier thinks and god what is he waiting for, Erik whines high in his throat, tilting his hips, displaying himself, thinking _do you want an engraved invitation?_ , which earns him a sharp, real smack across bare skin.

"Such cheek," Professor Xavier says. He pinches reddening flesh sternly and Erik yelps. As the pain fades, the new ache of being filled replaces it, Professor Xavier's thick cockhead pushing into Erik's hole.

He remembers it, of course, the weight and thickness of it, the sensitive head that Erik had suckled until it was flushed and spit-shiny. And he's imagined it, how he would feel as Professor Xavier fucked him with it, sliding in inch by inch--or, as Erik cries out, all at once in one long, punishing thrust.

Behind him, Professor Xavier sighs, a heavy, satisfied sound. "You do take it so well," he says. "If you could only see yourself..."

And then Erik _does_ , a flicker of disorientation as he sees what he knows is his own back, flushed pink and damp with sweat, a handprint and a vicious little red mark on his ass, and Professor Xavier buried deep up in his hole, sliding back a little so Erik can _see_.

"God," Erik gasps. "Please, sir, I can't--"

"Poor creature." The image dissolves in a red haze as Professor Xavier begins to thrust. "You've been wanting this for so long. It was cruel to make you wait." He doesn't sound particularly bothered by that. Erik rides along with the words; they flow under him like waves, tugging him along with Professor Xavier moving fierce and heavy inside him. "Do you think you can come without being touched? I bet you can."

He probably can; this moment is all he's been able to think of for a week. Erik writhes and moans with embarrassment, and imagines one of his colleagues walking in, or a professor, or Professor Xavier's stupid, innocent little TA. They'd see him, jeans around his knees, ass in the air with tears and probably snot and saliva smeared across his face and hear him moaning "Just like the slut you are," Professor Xavier says, the words more fragmented than before, "giving it up so easy."

Erik comes hard at the picture, at the drag of Professor Xavier's cock over his prostate. His dick jerks, painting his shirt and the desktop with come and Erik can see it, streaked across the fake grain of the wood. He fumbles for balance, to keep himself up even as his muscles give out and he wants to collapse and let Professor Xavier use him until he finishes, or maybe keep fucking him forever as time stretches out on the high of his orgasm.

"That wasn't in the plan," he thinks Professor Xavier says, but everything's hazy and unreal, and before he knows it Professor Xavier's pulling out and pulling away, the cold office air sudden on Erik's burning skin. He whimpers as pleasure fades and the pain of a rough fucking seeps in.

 _Stay still_ , Professor Xavier orders. Erik complies, incapable of doing much more than wonder how he missed Professor Xavier finishing until, _oh_ , a hand shapes itself to his hip and he hears the slap-slap sound of flesh being roughly stroked and Professor Xavier grunting, a heavy swallow Erik remembers from last week, and then thick, hot spurts of come paint Erik's back, his spine, the throbbing cheeks of his ass, his hole.

"So good," Professor Xavier breathes. "Such a good boy for me. You'll wear that, of course, like you promised."

Last week he had walked around with the taste of Professor Xavier in his mouth. This week he'll walk around with his come and his scent plastered all over him. Erik shivers.

"You can open your eyes now."

The world swims back into something like focus, although Erik's eyelids don't seem to want to cooperate. He feels drugged, content with afterglow but also strangely altered, as if his world has shifted a few degrees away from reality. The office he's had for the past two years doesn't seem like his office. It smells like recycled air and sex. His papers have all scattered aronund the floor. His computer... he frowns. His computer's somehow turned itself off.

"You should probably straighten yourself up before someone comes by," Professor Xavier advises. Erik pushes himself up, wincing when he realizes he's got come all over his palm now, in addition to the desk and his shirt.

Professor Xavier's taken care of himself, tucked away neatly and thoroughly presentable again. Aside from the high color in his cheeks, the exhilarated glitter of his blue eyes, he looks as if he's come straight from the labs. His gaze flickers down Erik's body, to where his cock is hanging out of his boxers and his jeans are still half-mast at his thighs.

"Very impressive," Professor Xavier says, "but as I said, you should straighten yourself up."

He watches as Erik tugs up boxers and jeans, licking his lips as fabric covers the come he's left behind. Erik shivers. He's going to feel awful and clammy and itchy soon, but he has Professor Xavier all over him now, his scent sunk into him, the fading throb on his ass cheek from the spanking and the pinch.

And, Erik realizes when he reaches out to his computer again, he has a broken laptop. Dazed with shock, he realizes that his powers must have slipped--he hasn't lost control since he was a teenager--and he's somehow wiped the drive.

"My fucking computer!" The screen remains stubbornly blank, aside from a smear of come from Erik's unwashed hands drying at the corner.

"Oh, poor love," says Professor Xavier, sounding thoroughly unrepentant. He looks it too, flushed and happy, when Erik swings around to glare at him. "I do hope you've got your data backed up."

"I should make you buy me a new one," Erik growls.

"Or I could pay you," Professor Xavier murmurs silkily. He straightens his cuffs. "I could pay you, like the whore you are."

Erik stiffens. A rush of desire, hot and sick, curls down his spine and pools between his legs. He's acutely aware of the professor's come drying on his ass and the lube between his cheeks and and a cut on his lip.

"Because that's what you are, isn't it?" Professor Xavier asks. He runs his thumb over Erik's lip, pressing against the cut so Erik hisses. Thoughtfully Professor Xavier licks the blood off the pad. "Such a hungry little slut. Do you want to work for it?"

"I..." He has sufficient funds for a new laptop so long as he's careful; his research fellowship covers all equipment. He doesn't need Professor Xavier's money.

"No blowjob, no matter how good, is going to cover a new Macbook," Erik says.

Professor Xavier laughs, low and delighted. "Oh, of course. Delightful as yours are, you lovely cocksucker." He grasps Erik by the wrist, not a hesitant or beseeching gesture; he has a powerful grip, pressing assertively down into bone and tendon. "Then perhaps you should come home with me."

Erik's world teeters, poised on the edge of something. Erik pushes it the rest of the way over.

"How much?"

"Oh, pet, you are..." Professor Xavier drops Erik's hand. Those blue, blue eyes of his look right down into Erik, down into the places hidden from everyone else. "Does it really matter how much I offer? We both know you'll be there either way, you want it that badly."

It's true. Erik's already aching for it, for something huge and nameless that has no shape except that of shadows and pain and ownership. It's the fear more than anything that spurs him on. It always is, the desire to overcome it.

"And," Professor Xavier continues, "as adorable as it is, you trying to negotiate, I have to get to a faculty meeting. So be a good boy and wait in the engineering library for me, and I'll come to collect you when I'm done."

He doesn't wait for Erik's agreement--they both know it's pointless--before he leaves, a cloud of satisfaction trailing behind him. Erik stares, thinking distantly that the library is crowded on Thursdays, and he'll be surrounded by his colleagues, smelling of sex and sticky with it, and coming apart under the skin with it, until Professor Xavier comes and saves him.


	9. Platypuses/platypi/platypodes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hairless things were trying to warn him, Erik decided. _Try to escape and this will be your fate. Stuffed and carried around by our young._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: So they are platypuses. I have conducted no research on monotremes for this.
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43398561851/clarasteam-codenamecesare-kath-ballantyne) and inspired by kath-ballantyne's adorable platypus!Erik art. I've modified the original version significantly to change a few details I didn't like and to make some things better.

“Lookit, Mom! Lookit the funny duck-rabbit-thing!” As if on cue, the other kids scurried over, chattering and pointing excitedly at the small brown creature rustling through the foliage. Katherine sighed and dutifully followed Scott, Jean, Alex, and Darwin over to yet another miracle of the animal kingdom.

“How funny!” “Is it real?” “SO CUTE” “Mom, why’s it got fur and a beak?” “What does it eat?” “What’s his name?”

“Oh, that’s Erik,” said the zoo guide, mercifully interrupting the deluge of questions. Her nametag introduced her as Moira. “He’s a platypus.”

“Platy-puss. Weird,” said Alex. He plastered himself to the glass wall. On the other side of it, the platypus launched itself off the top of a mudslide and zoomed into the water. Jean laughed and clapped her hands. “But why’s he got a crash helmet on?”

“He likes it,” Zoo Guide Moira said.

”It says here he’s poisonous!” Jean glanced between the information plaque and Erik, who was now darting through the water, snapping up shrimp in his bill. 

“That’s also why he still wears his helmet,” said Moira. “He’s very grumpy, and he’s become much more so since Charles and the eggs. So he tries to sting anyone who comes into his and Charles’s enclosure.”

“They lay eggs?” That was Darwin this time. Katherine wanted to ask about _Charles and the eggs_ but the kids were inundating Moira with questions about fur and eggs, and how they’d just learned what mammals are and “Mammals have fur and mammals don’t lay eggs!” said Scott.

“In fact, some mammals can lay eggs,” Moira said. Katherine prayed she wouldn’t try to explain the concept of a monotreme to a group of overexcited seven-year-olds.

“Can we see the eggs?” Jean asked, tearing her gaze away from the helmeted platypus to gaze beseechingly up at Moira.

“Oh, I’m afraid not,” Moira said. “You see, platypuses lay their eggs in nice, safe burrows so predators can’t get them. And Erik is very vigilant about making sure no one comes near them.” Jean deflated.

“At least he’s stopped trying to escape,” Moira added. “There were lots of jailbreaks before the eggs came along. And Charles seems to have calmed him down a little.”

“Charles?” Katherine asked.

* * *

The flying metal tube which had brought them here would get them away from here and back home, Erik knew. It was just a matter of getting back to it. His escape might be delayed, and he would need to take into account Charles and the pups, but Erik was confident he could do it.

The hairless things were out again, jabbering excitedly on the other side of the frozen water wall that divided his territory from theirs. Erik half-wished they would try to cross the barrier just so he could have an excuse to sting them, like he did the stupid hairless things that tried to mess with his den. Charles said that they weren't trying to _mess_ with his den, they were making sure everything was snug and clean, which Erik just found insulting. He was a perfectly clean platypus, thank you. And the den in which they kept the eggs was immaculate.

Erik hunted for only a few minutes, his usually excellent magnetic-sensing abilities distracted by the noise the hairless things were making, worry over the eggs, and the realization that he might need to leave his helmet behind when they did finally escape, as it would obviously draw attention. One day, Erik had seen one of the hairless things clutching a dead platypus (Charles told him it was a toy, and had not ever been alive) with a soft-looking helmet on its head.

The hairless things were trying to warn him, Erik decided. _Try to escape and this will be your fate. Stuffed and carried around by our young._

He would show them, Erik vowed as he slithered out of the water to greet Charles.

“Hello, darling,” Charles said, bumping at Erik with his beak. “You’e been thinking dark thoughts.”

“No darker than usual.” Charles’s fur was so soft and thick, even for a platypus. Erik loved it. 

They had ended up together on the metal tube, both of them taken captive by the hairless things. Charles had thought it was all a grand adventure—that he had, in fact, conspired to get himself caught so he could learn more about the hairless creatures that went around on two legs and made ridiculous noises to communicate. When they had been separated, Erik had fought as fiercely as he could; Charles was clearly an idiot, an endearing idiot, and needed to be protected from his own enthusiasm. After he had stung and clawed the white-coated hairless thing that had tried to take him away from Charles, the hairless things had reconsidered and put him and Charles back together, and then conceded some of their territory to them.

Erik had acquired his helmet after a stupid young hairless thing had thrown it into his enclosure. Erik had considered it tribute, rightfully won after terrifying the stupid little creature into submission. When the elders of its tribe had come to take it from him, Erik had stung two of them and clawed another, and humiliated and defeated, they had acknowledged his right to keep the helmet.

The eggs… at the time, Erik had believed they’d been given the eggs to force them into staying, that they’d been forced to choose between escape and the knowledge that escaping would leave five helpless pups in the power of the hairless things. Charles, of course, had been the one to take care of the eggs, finding them when he’d been off in the white room where the hairless things would stick needles and such into them. He’d gone over to the eggs and curled up around them (typical Charles) and the hairless things had decided to see if Charles and Erik (whom they referred to as “the old married couple” when they thought Erik wasn’t listening) would raise them.

Well„ he would spare some of them when it came time for him, Charles, and the pups to escape, Erik decided. The brown-topped one, Moira, the one who stole shrimp from her tribe to give it to Charles and Erik. She could live.

All the others, though…. Erik was damned if he’d let evolutionarily inferior species keep him and his loved ones captive.

He waddled back to the burrow to let Charles have a chance to hunt and study the hairless things. The eggs needed to be watched at all times, lest the hairless things try to take them. If they did… they would be very, very sorry.


	10. Backsliding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He stops, arrested not by the realization of his nudity, but by the sight of a boy watching him from the alley kitty-corner to his side of the building. The streetlight throws him into sharp relief, dark, hawkish eyes, a tumble of brown hair, oversized coat. Those eyes take Brandon’s interest and give straight back, and even on the other side of the glass Brandon can see the alertness, the swift and complete appraisal of his body

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Hey, something different! And not platypuses. This is Wesley Gibson (Wanted)/Brandon Sullivan (Shame), hence McFassy, told from Brandon's POV. Warnings for sex addiction, mostly-anonymous/stranger sex, some objectification.
> 
> Originally written for [trobador's awesome "Eyecontact" photoset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43518439168/mrkinch-eye-contact-this-now-has).

Not long after Sissy leaves, he does too. He breaks his lease, packs his records, his clothes, his new laptop (only after deleting Porntube from his bookmarks), and moves it all down to Brooklyn, down to a Victorian brick one-bedroom with a leafy street and a neighbor with a husband and a new baby.

She’s got curves through her hips and a bit of belly Brandon imagines burying his face in on the way down to her cunt. 

He pushes uselessly at the images whenever he sees her walk past, pushing the little one in the stroller, her husband manfully lugging the diaper bag or carrying their coffee mugs as they head off on a morning errand. He tries to put himself in her husband’s place, but the thought of actually having a kid—having sex for anything past the moment of burying himself in someone else’s flesh and coming so his mind is blank for that one blessed second—stymies him.

Weirdly, it’s the only thing that helps him _stop_ thinking about sex. Given what happened the last time he tried to have sex with someone he genuinely wanted—the last time he saw a woman as a mind and a soul, as a certain quality of laughter—maybe he should think about marriage and procreation all the fucking time. Or at least all the time he wants to fuck.

At least he hasn’t had sex for two weeks and he knows it without having to look. The calendar he keeps is in his head, every day etched into his neurons. He has enough pop psychology and weird yoga spiritualist shit pushed on him by Sissy to know that the instability of moving might trigger his addiction just as easily as new surroundings, a clean start, might let him leave it behind. The hell of it is, there’s no leaving the past behind. It drags behind him everywhere he goes, both the images of the woman next door and the deeper memories he doesn’t think about.

So it’s strange when he realizes things are different. That his commute needs a train and a bus. That the city sounds are muted by distance, not elevation.

That he lives in a first-floor apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows. That he can’t, as he always did, walk naked through the rectangle of insulated space, comfortable and free and unwatched by anyone.

He stops, arrested not by the realization of his nudity, but by the sight of a boy watching him from the alley kitty-corner to his side of the building. The streetlight throws him into sharp relief, dark, hawkish eyes, a tumble of brown hair, oversized coat. Those eyes take Brandon’s interest and give straight back, and even on the other side of the glass Brandon can see the alertness, the swift and complete appraisal of his body.

His cock twitches, and the hunger starts to chew at him, grinding up his sanity and spitting it back out. On the other side of the window, the boy—young man, it’s hard to say, just please god let him be legal—doesn’t even smile, although one eyebrow arches meaningfully and his mouth moves in words Brandon can’t decipher.

Brandon inclines his head in the direction of the door. His heart rackets in his chest for a moment before calming. It knows the ritual, or will know it as soon as the boy takes him up on his offer.

The boy shoves himself away from the wall. He moves with a slouch to his shoulders but a certain confidence in himself that reminds Brandon of the best hookers, all swagger and knowing.

Mouth dry, he opens the door.

“You are ten kinds of fucking stupid,” the kid says. He pushes in past Brandon, wild-haired and utterly out of place as he turns a 360 to look up at the wainscoting and the antique light fixture. The gaze (blue, Brandon realizes, very blue eyes, cold but somehow hot and manic) fixes on him again, cataloging the muscle and bone and skin of him, the cock that is well on its way to erect between Brandon’s legs. “But I guess it works out okay for me.”

“Can I get you a drink?” He has water, orange juice, some fancy microbrew he works through at a bottle a day.

“How about something else to start?” the boy asks. “Since you’re ready and all.”

“Bedroom’s this way,” Brandon says. The boy steps around him impatiently—and, rather more prudently than Brandon’s managed so far tonight, draws the shades.

“So I was thinking, I need to blow off some steam, so it’d be great if you blew _me_ ,” the boy says. His mouth is red and full and paradoxically innocent, even though all Brandon can do is imagine what they’d look like wrapped around his cock. The boy smirks. “Maybe I’ll reciprocate, or maybe I’ll fuck the living daylights out of you. God knows you look like you need it.”

He does need it. He’s fucking going to break apart if he doesn’t get it. Almost stupidly, Brandon glances down at his cock, which is thick and straining and drawing his entire body into a knot around it.

“Okay then,” the boy says, smirking first at Brandon’s cock and then his face. He shucks his jacket. He’s all muscle underneath, compact and close, practical muscle, not like the bodies Brandon would see every day at the gym. It’s the muscle that does, that lives, that would be good and practiced at holding Brandon down. Incongruously, Brandon notes he’s got freckles. His teeth are crooked. His fingers look like they’ve been broken.

Usually he doesn’t notice bodies in their particularities beyond some assessment of the pleasure they might bring him. The boy stands out, something strange and dangerous in the suburban civility of Brandon’s room.

He wonders, wildly, what the boy’s name is. If knowing it would change anything like it did with Marianne.

“What’s your name?”

“Wesley,” the boy says as he pushes his jeans open and shoves them down enough to get to his boxers and pull his dick out. There’s a red mark on the thigh of his jeans, like blood. “Is that all? Because it if is, you can suck me now.”

“Yeah,” Brandon says. _Wesley_. He fixes it in his mind even as he kneels and Wesley’s strong fingers, smelling like oil and metal, lace through his hair. His fingers brush over a scar, a divot, signs of a hard life.

A life, a mind.

“Come on,” Wesley murmurs, and draws Brandon onto him.

Salt, heat, choking, breath whistling heady in his nostrils and Wesley’s voice a tumble of praise and filth.

( _Maybe_ , Wesley says after he’s licked his spunk out of Brandon’s mouth, _maybe I’ll keep you._

He’s never been kept, Brandon thinks dazedly as Wesley begins to jerk him off, one muscled arm wrapped tight around his waist. He wonders what that’s like.)


	11. Dystopia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He told me just before he was arrested," Lady Moira continued, and helplessly Erik said silently to himself _damn it, Charles, why didn’t you call us?_ He pushed the frightening possibilities – that his communications had been intercepted, that he'd been taken before he could call, that he'd died somewhere – to the side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: A retro-futuristic dystopian AU. Warnings for references to experimentation on children. Advertisement for badass!Moira and badass!Erik being badass together. And even though Charles doesn't appear, he's very important, and is also a badass in my headcanon for this.
> 
> Inspired by [this awesome photoset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43323556471/fourteenacross-trobador-x-men-first-class) by [trobador](http://trobador.tumblr.com). Everyone looks so sexy and, as I've said, badass! The version posted here is expanded from the OP on Tumblr.

According to Erik’s information, compiled from Kitty’s database tour and whatever Emma had culled on her own trips to the UK and the States, Lady Moira MacTaggert was utterly human. No trace of her had turned up in the gene registries. She had been educated at Howell and then at Oxford, taking her advanced degree at Harvard. Political science, Erik remembered from her transcripts, with a thesis on the Mutant Registration Act.

She looked as indomitable as she looked in the passport photo Kitty had dug up for him, her brown hair disheveled and smart society hat missing, but she stared straight at him. Erik had frisked her for devices and she hadn't flinched, although she'd gone tense when he'd appropriated the knife tucked behind her right calf. If she had plastic on her, it had to be entirely internal. Erik could jam transmissions, at least, if she had any hidden microphone tucked inside her.

He paced the room slowly, giving her time to settle into the knowledge of her position. Sometimes the silence wore at them, wondering what the mutant was going to do. She had fillings and a pin in one knee; he felt the unpleasant grate of scar tissue against the surgical steel. Tearing the pin through that would be incapacitating.

"You knew Dr. Xavier at Oxford," he said at last.

Lady Moira inclined her head, not turning or twisting to follow him as he walked behind her. "Not well. I was at Balliol, he was at Pembroke."

 _Not well_ didn’t explain why Erik had found her in the old Xavier house in New York, prying back a loose floorboard under the library rug. He resisted the urge to check his breast pocket to see if the small bit of silicon was still safe. Lady Moira stared flatly at him. Erik had to give her credit; he had melded the handcuffs to the chair, and probably tightly enough that they chafed her wrist, but she wasn’t hysterical like so many humans would be when bound with an angry mutant in front of them.

"We tend to take it personally when one of our own is arrested by human authorities," Erik said. That it had been done in contravention of the Genoshan Accords, that Charles had diplomatic immunity, that the rest of the world didn’t seem to care because it was the United States that had done it… Erik kept all that off his face as he regarded Lady Moira stonily. "If you know who I am," he had seen the flash of recognition on her face, "you can see why I would also have a problem with humans scavenging in the residence of one of our citizens."

"Scavenging?" Lady Moira rolled her eyes. "Hardly."

"Then what were you doing there?" He loomed a little, enough that she would have had to crane her head back to look up at him, but she stared resolutely at the blank anonymity of the hotel room wall.

"Old research," Lady Moira said. She recrossed her legs, the fancy silk of her dress shushing quietly. "And beyond wrongful imprisonment, I’m… afraid. Afraid for Charles."

She did look at him this time. So he could see the honesty, Erik knew. Liars looked at him to plead with him to believe, but this – this was fear, something he hadn't seen on her face before.

They hadn’t been lovers, at least not that Emma or Kitty had turned up. Given Lady Moira’s status and Charles’s—old British aristocracy and money—there would have been something in the gossip magazines. Maybe not romantic, Erik thought, but close. Close enough that Charles would have told her about himself and his family, and the secrets of the old house.

"He told me just before he was arrested," Lady Moira continued, and helplessly Erik said silently to himself _damn it, Charles, why didn’t you call us?_ He pushed the frightening possibilities – that his communications had been intercepted, that he'd been taken before he could call, that he'd died somewhere – to the side. "He had reason to believe the American government had found some old files from the sixties and seventies, at the height of the registration movement."

Fear gripped Erik’s heart; with an effort, he kept it off his face. 

The Decades, the Genoshans called it, the almost twenty years when mutants suffered from the registration acts passed around the world. It had led to the liberation and establishment of Genosha in the eighties, and the Accords signed in eighty-five—mercifully before the end of the Cold War, when America and Russia could still vie for the political alliance Genosha had refused to give. After that, though… well, Genosha was small but determined. The four-year Sentinel blockade, even now collapsing with civil unrest in the Americas and the EU dissolving like sugar in water, had proven breakable long before. They would win, Erik knew.

He hated thinking of that victory without Charles there to share it.

"Alongside that movement," Lady Moira continued, her dark eyes watching him closely—seeing, maybe, the fear and anger Erik didn’t want her to see, "there were much more covert activities, of course. Weaponizing mutants—enhancing mutations, accelerating latent mutations, determining potential tactical applications, you name it. Weapon X and the Super-Soldier programs were two of them, although they focused on adults. The one Charles believed the Americans had stumbled on had been…" Lady Moira swallowed and shook her head.

Focused on adults. Erik wanted to vomit.

"Children," he said. Anger rose up to replace the fear. He had come from one such program, taken away from his parents under the pretense of _social services_ three days after he'd gone for testing. "They experimented on mutant children."

Lady Moira nodded. "They called it Black Womb. And Subject X-0 was—"

"Charles."

"Yes." She swallowed and, after a hesitation, nodded at the locked briefcase Erik had confiscated from her. "There's a false bottom in it. It has all the records I could dig up from a contact in the CIA and the files from Charles's house."  
"Why on would a rich nuclear physicist in upstate New York keep confidential government files on genetics research in his library?" Erik demanded. Charles had never talked about his family – few people did, beyond the families they had chosen or found – but he had mentioned his father's profession in passing.

"Because," Lady Moira said, "Professor Xavier – Charles's father, I mean – was involved in Black Womb." A light shorted out in a flare of sparks and the bracket holding the bulb folded inward, crushing it. Lady Moira flinched. "He must have kept the files from Charles's… from the experiments. But you can see, Mr. Lehnsherr," and that was the first time she'd used his name, "that the government _has_ to have found the originals, and now they have Charles, and maybe they can finish what they started."

 _The perfect weapon_. Shaw had called Erik that once. But an augmented telepath, a psionic bomb set to detonate and take out only mutants…

Charles was even more perfect.

"I can get you access to places you wouldn't have a chance in hell of breaking into," Lady Moira said, adding before Erik could scoff, "and get out of alive. You've fooled the Sentinels so far, but if you think it's going to be that easy waltzing into Alamagordo, I hope Charles isn't placing much faith in you."

"He places enough," Erik said curtly. He gestured and the cuffs holding Lady Moira's wrists down melted open. She rubbed at the chafed skin, wincing at a cut that bled a little. Erik refused to be sorry. "Does he trust you?"

"Yes," Lady Moira said. "Can I have my knife back?"


	12. Cursus honorum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carolus sighs and prods Erik until he reluctantly sits up. The thin mattress, a slave's mattress, creaks under him as Carolus sits down on it. Scholars' fingers probe at the bruise on his ribs; Erik refuses to hiss in pain, although he can't help his body stiffening. Or other things, which mercifully Carolus does not notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: pre-ish slash. Warnings/notes for: significant age difference and potential underage (by contemporary standards), as Charles is 17ish and Erik is around 25-30; slavery.
> 
> Inspired by [this lovely fanart](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43603763764/synekdokee-thoseweirdthings-19022013) by [thoseweirdthings](http://thoseweirdthings.tumblr.com), which was in turn inspired by [Ancient Rome AU](http://rainboxxx.tumblr.com/post/40854685037/au-ancient-rome-au) by rainboxxx, in which Charles is a young philosophy student/aristocrat and Erik is a former gladiator.
> 
> Honestly, this fandom has the most inspiring art.

"Quintas…"

"Erik."

Carolus sighs and prods Erik until he reluctantly sits up. The thin mattress, a slave's mattress, creaks under him as Carolus sits down on it. Scholars' fingers probe at the bruise on his ribs; Erik refuses to hiss in pain, although he can't help his body stiffening. Or other things, which mercifully Carolus does not notice.

"Very well, Erik," Carolus says, drawing back to fix Erik with a severe blue gaze. "You oughtn't get into fights like that. You're not in the arena anymore."

"And you oughtn't be down here in the slaves' quarters," Erik retorts, and can't resist adding, " _Magistrule_."

"Knock it off," Carolus growls. It's the growl of a kitten, or a lion cub. Erik knows potential, has seen it in even the most frightened, abject slave tossed in the sandy circle of the gladiators' practice ring. Carolus has it, for all that, at first sight, he looks like ten _minutes_ of military service might break him, not the ten years custom requires.

He thinks of Carolus' name, a pun on a name that his father had learned while serving as a praetor among the Germani and Franci. _Carolus_ , free man, and _carulus_ , the beloved one, the only son of the family. Free and beloved: Carolus is both. It's a ridiculous name, but Carolus wears it well.

"Honestly," Carolus is saying, glowering at Erik, and it occurs to Erik that Carolus is completely unafraid of him. Erik has seen old men, men who have had armies at their backs, cower from him, covered in the blood of other men, their entrails fresh on his unsheathed sword. "Why do you do this, Erik? It gets you nothing. It certainly won't get you your freedom; my stepfather wanted you flogged, but I told him you were mine and so mine to punish."

"And will you punish me, _magistrule_?" Erik asks, and adds in the Greek he knows Carolus studies, "Little master?"

Carolus compresses his red, red mouth into a firm line. One of his family's cognomens is _Sapiens_ , knowing, and he's overheard other men, older men, joking about the other meaning of _sapio_ , I taste, I savor: I taste his mouth with a kiss, _cupio savio orem sapere_. That mouth is so close, Erik could taste it, if he wants. He has muscle, and size, and experience; he could have what those other men will never touch, and now, if he wishes it. The tunic can't hide the places where Carolus body is a slim, untouched curve, or other places that are fuller, more lush with muscle and fat.

He'd gotten into that fight hearing some other house's slaves on the street making ribald comments about what they would do with Carolus if they could get hold of him in the baths, or alone in an alley.

Having him so close is punishment enough. He doesn't need Carolus' "Yes."

"How, then," he makes himself say, "will you punish me?"

A whipping is usual, or restricted rations. Erik's fairly certain he can ignore whatever the arm of any man in the household can deal out.

"Fetching and carrying my books, listening to my poetry." An eloquent arch of Carolus' brow says he's heard Erik's complaints. "Accompanying me to the libraries and galleries. And," Carolus' humor falls away, "talking with me."

"About what?" Erik asks belligerently. "What could a slave possibly have to say to a patrician?"

"What it was like for you." Carolus looks away, tensing when Erik's hand closes on his wrist. "What… what your life has been like."

"There's nothing about me to say," Erik says flatly. "I was born free." _To honorable parents._ "I was made a slave by your Caesar. And that's all there is."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on the terrible Latin:
> 
>  _magistrule_ is the direct-address form of _magistrulus_ , "little master." It refers both to Charles's status as Erik's owner and his academic preferences.
> 
>  _Carolus_ is the Latin form of the Germanic name that eventually becomes Charles. 
> 
> Erik's Latin name, Quintas, is of course a hat-tip to Centurion.


	13. Family portrait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Never again," Charles mumbled. "Never, in a million years." He peeled one eye open to glare at Erik balefully. _And if you laugh and wake her up, I_ will _destroy you_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: C/E, Alpha/Omega (Erik's the alpha, Charles is... you can probably guess). Notes for post-childbirth stuff, although nothing graphic. This is set post-XMFC, although with no divorce.
> 
> Inspired by [asix-oud](http://asix-oud.tumblr.com)'s lovely [Family Portrait?](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43894340958/spicedpiano-asix-oud-family-portrait), and significantly expanded from the OP on Tumblr.

"How are you?" Erik asked. A drift of annoyance answered that question with the dismissiveness it deserved. He offered an apologetic smile, which Charles accepted with a sleepy smile of his own.

Erik turned down the lights and checked to be sure the drapes were drawn before undressing. After far too long a time, he crawled into bed, curling up with Charles, the baby between them.

As tradition dictated, he'd made the bed himself, with the softest blankets and the warmest comforter he could find, the baby wrapped in an age-soft blanket from Erik's side of the family. The bed already smelled like Charles, who was giving off both his lovely, distracting scent and irritation at having to be in _another_ bed after the requisite two weeks of confinement also demanded by tradition, damned inconvenient thing that it was. Erik, who was not typically given to sympathy, did feel bad for the poor people on the receiving end of the criticisms Charles had penned of the articles they'd submitted for peer review, and for the senators making foolish remarks about the "mutant situation" in the press.

The attendants had taken the old mattress and pads away, although the smell of them was slow to die. Erik thought of pain and distress, how pale his mate's face was under tousled brown hair and his freckles, a moment only before Charles soothed away the roughness of it.

"First one's always the roughest," Cecelia their obstetrician had said, before pointing out there was a reason they didn't let alphas in the room. _Tradition_ said it wasn't seemly; pragmatics said it was to keep the alpha from what Charles referred to as _outdated_ behavior like trying to kill anyone not of the tribe coming near zir vulnerable mate. And so the traditional first-night's sleep, alpha and omega and child together, alone.

 _At least it's a different bed?_ Erik asked. That got him some amusement. _But you never answered my question… how are you?_

"Never again," Charles mumbled. "Never, in a million years." He peeled one eye open to glare at Erik balefully. _And if you laugh and wake her up, I_ will _destroy you_.

"I mean it," Charles continued, his glower softened somewhat when he looked down at the sleeping bundle between them. It fell away completely when Erik touched the baby's palm and tiny fingers closed reflexively around his finger, tugging it close. "If you want another one, you'll have to carry it. I'll get Hank to rig up a… a pouch. Or something."

Erik wiped every trace of smirk from his face. It didn't help. _I can feel you laughing_ , Charles thought at him, the words tinged with exhaustion and crankiness. And fondness, always that, lacing over him and the baby. The tide of Charles's weariness pulled at him, tugging him away from himself, and it was never that bad—not enough to influence—unless Charles was deeply unwell.

"Do you need the doctor? The midwife?" Erik asked quietly. He could have asked telepathically, but there was something about the weight of his voice between them, and Charles's telepathy had an edge to it, the way it got when he was overtaxed.

"I'm fine." His mate gifted him with a jaw-cracking yawn. "Just trying very hard not to think about sleepless nights for the next two years. I can understand why my mother had a wet-nurse and nanny for me. And anyways," Charles continued before Erik could chase _that_ dark line of thought, "I think you've scared them off."

"Too many strangers," Erik grumbled, choosing to ignore the fact that they'd known Cecelia and her assistant for over a year, ever since they started trying. At least the smell of antiseptic had died, replaced by warmth and earthiness and the baby' fresh-milk scent, and Charles's, which was heavy with sleep and an undertone of blood. Erik gave serious thought to summoning all the metal in the house and barricading the door, to keep the world out and keep this place untouched.

 _That's touchingly cave-alpha of you, but Cecelia and the pediatrician are going to have to come in eventually. And the rabbi, for the one-moon ceremony…_ Charles trailed off, his breath evening out. _We'll have to decide on a name for her._

"Stupid ritual," Erik huffed. Tradition said to wait a month, to be sure the infant and parents had bonded properly, and after those four weeks the baby would receive its name. Nowadays it was mostly an excuse for families to show off and extort presents out of friends and relations.

"So noted," Charles murmured. _My telepathy is rather open at the moment, darling. But I'll spare you the ordering of sterling silver naming cups_. He yawned again and settled deeper into the clean blankets, one bare shoulder protruding above them.

Erik wanted to kiss the sturdy, bony point of it, but the baby was there and still had a death-grip on his finger, her lips moving soundlessly. He'd seen her eyes earlier, a lovely cloudy blue, even though Charles had sleepily said something about melanin and how they might change, maybe to Charles's deeper blue or Erik's green-grey. She had the tiniest bit of blondish-brown, silky scruff dusting her head, with which Erik was, possibly, already besotted.

He thought about blood and death and solitude, and one night in the water, and meeting an omega who was certifiably mad _and_ was a telepath _and_ who had a doctorate _and_ worked for the CIA _and_ wasn't afraid of him _and_ wanted to change the world. Erik had sincerely doubted the possibility of that last, but Charles was… persuasive. Still, he hadn't believed it until after Shaw's death, and one night a month later when he and Charles had first twined together and he'd discovered he'd bound himself to Charles long before Charles had formally accepted him.

"I didn't think I'd ever have this, you know," he said, and didn't trust his voice to say much more.

 _You do_ , Charles said, the words a rush of warmth that suffused Erik down into the spaces between his bones. _Always_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine [this one](http://asix-oud.tumblr.com/post/43677618724/the-morning-after) is after one too many interrupted nights due to fussiness.


	14. Brothers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The problem with having so many brothers was that, sooner or later, you had to end up being "The ______________ One."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: C/E, AU in a world where Charles has four brothers: Max, Simon, his twin Wesley, and Brian. This makes Charles's life difficult.
> 
> Inspired by [this exchange and gifset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43803017837/synekdokee-kageillusionz) on Tumblr. Thank you to [lunac7](http://lunac7.tumblr.com) for the lovely images!

The problem with having so many brothers was that, sooner or later, you had to end up being "The ______________ One." Max was The Law and Order One (who thought Charles didn't know about the speed he used working on cases), Simon was The Arty One (never mind he had some scary black-market connections as a result of his work), Wesley was The Crazy One (this actually was true). Somehow Charles got stuck as The Innocent One, perhaps as a result of being the nerdy twin who wanted to be a professor, while his womb-mate Wesley wanted to shoot things instead of take over the accounting side of the Xavier family business.

After Brian came along, he usurped Charles's title. And so Charles became The One Who Has To Be Protected From His Own Impulses.

"Yeah, he can control metal," Wesley said as he cleaned one of his technical knives. "So what?"

"I wish you wouldn't do that at the kitchen table," Charles said. He reached for the whetstone, but Wesley plucked it right out from under his fingers and moved it out of reach. "And as regards the so what, I thought you and he might have something in common. Admittedly, your metallokinesis seems to be limited in scope, but you both enjoy putting holes in people."

"Are you trying to hook us up? Thought he was supposed to be your boyfriend."

"He is!" _You're being intentionally difficult_ , he added, wishing his telepathic voice didn't sound so petulant. Wesley smirked. "It's just, I thought it would be nice if you all could get along and not have the three of you trying to scare away someone I'm romantically interested in."

"No chance of that, Charlie," Wesley said, with such fake sympathy Charles considered violating the sacred bonds of twinship and giving him a massive headache. "Hand me that rag over there, will you?"

* * *

"Simon told me he heard about the art heist in Switzerland," Erik said later. They were back at Erik's place, which was a bit on the seedy side but at least did not have Max, Simon, and Wesley in it. International thieves-assassins-spies didn't live quite as glamorously as Charles would have thought. "And Max told me what he'd do to me if I got you involved in anything."

Charles had jumped out of planes, read the minds of the heads of state of fifteen different nations, told Wesley that that crazy loom of his had missed a couple people, and telepathically assisted Max with his interrogations. He had met Erik on a trip to Russia, when Moira had called him about a troublesome double agent they were trying to ferret out. Yet somehow all of this paled next to the album full of pictures of his baby blue-eyed self, gamely reading _War and Peace_ at five years old, holding his Science Fair trophy (years eight through sixteen), holding his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. It was extremely irritating.

"They're just being overprotective and ridiculous," Charles said. He kissed Erik's bare, sweaty shoulder. "They'll come around. Eventually."

"Don't count on it," Wesley said from some shadows across the room, near the windows. "I've got Max stationed in the empty apartment across the street. He's listening in, if you try anything."

"Ignore him," Charles advised, and turned over to go to sleep.


	15. The Life of Ω

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And as if a burning, newly-sunk cruise ship and a tropical storm weren't enough, he was trapped with no clothes, no papers, _no suppressants_ , on the lifeboat with an alpha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: C/E, Alpha/Omega 'verse. This is set in a modern AU, but attitudes regarding omegas are still somewhat backwards. I have not researched lifeboat or rescue procedures, so please ignore the handwaving.
> 
> Inspired by [this hilarious piece](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/43695612395/professorofeljay-astasia-definitively-thats) by [astasia](http://astasia.tumblr.com). Note please that this ficlet bears absolutely no resemblance to _The Life of Pi_ beyond characters being stuck in a boat in the middle of the ocean. _The Life of Pi_ is a highly-praised novel, a sensitive exploration of youth and spirituality, that has been made into an Oscar-nominated movie. This ficlet is just ridiculous.

Of course, Charles seethed to himself. Of _course_ this was his life. His first vacation in years – sabbaticals for research did not count – and he had let Raven bully him into taking a cruise instead of touring dusty cathedrals and museums because "you need to turn your brain off, Charles." And of course some critical part in the engine room had exploded, leading to other critical and highly flammable parts to explode or catch fire, and one minute Charles had been curled up in bed, nursing a Mai Tai headache, and the next he'd been flung into a lifeboat.

The tropical storm hadn't helped matters, although it had probably helped extinguish the flaming carcass of the cruise ship. Charles couldn't tell, because the wind and waves had driven his lifeboat far from the others. Far enough, he'd noticed earlier, that he couldn't see any emergency flares.

And as if a burning, newly-sunk cruise ship and a tropical storm weren't enough, he was trapped with no clothes, no papers, _no suppressants_ , on the lifeboat with an alpha.

Charles did, however, have one of the lifeboat's oars, and no compunctions about using it.

"Ow." The alpha rubbed his head and had the nerve, the nerve, to glower at Charles like somehow their current state—Charles crouched in the bow of the lifeboat, the alpha hunched in the stern, nursing the beginnings of a bruised temple—was Charles’s fault.

"Just because I hit you with the oar does not make me the guilty moral agent here," Charles said. He brandished the oar to emphasize his point; the alpha watched it warily. "You were the one who started… who started growling."

When dealing with alphas, Charles had discovered, it was best to be firm right off the bat. Or, he supposed, right off the oar. Some linguistically-challenged moron in ancient Greece might have got it into their head that _omega_ meant last physically, mentally, and morally, but science and rational thought had proven otherwise, and if some alphas needed that, literally, beaten into them… well, Charles was quite happy to volunteer.

While he watched, the alpha retired further into the back of the boat, warily eyeing the oar. At least the low rumbling Charles heard over the thwap-bounce of the waves against the lifeboat’s hull sounded more like complaining than feral, possessive growling.

"If you must know," the alpha said, sounding entirely too aggrieved to have learned his lesson, "that wasn’t _me_ growling, it was my stomach. We’ve been in this boat for twelve hours now, and I’m hungry."

Charles frowned.

"I’m hungry," the alpha said slowly, in the tone of voice that sounded far too much like it had a silent _irrational omega_ attached to it for Charles to feel at ease. He hefted the oar again. The alpha added, with a bit more respect, "You have the emergency kit up on your half of the boat. Can I at least have an energy bar, or are you going to starve me until I die so you can cannibalize me?"

"I would barely get any meat off you," Charles retorted, even though under the ruined tuxedo trousers and mostly-gone undershirt the alpha was promisingly muscled, curves of it over a wiry frame.

He shook his head. They would have to start collecting and desalinating water and rigging up their shelter. The sun and dehydration were clearly beginning to get to him.

"It would be inconvenient to have to roll your corpse over the side," Charles said. "And maybe, I don’t know, you could help catch fish. So here" Careful to keep the oar out of the alpha’s reach, he fumbled in the emergency kit and tossed a packet at the alpha, who caught it expertly.

"Thanks," said the alpha through a mouthful of energy bar. Charles thought he was going to eat the whole thing, but instead the alpha ate half and tossed the rest back to Charles. The alpha tucked himself down in a corner of the stern and watched Charles as he ate, an appraising expression that Charles tried to ignore.

"You have a good arm," the alpha said grudgingly. His expression brightened, to something more fierce than irritated; Charles needed a moment to recognize it as approval. "That’s a good sign. A strong fighter."

How, Charles sighed as he swallowed his energy bar, was it possible that this was his life.

"Look," he said, deciding that it was best to begin as he meant to go on, "we're going to be stuck here for god knows how long, so we may as well introduce ourselves and lay some ground rules. I'm Charles. Doctor Charles Xavier."

"Erik. Erik Lehnsherr." The alpha's mouth curled in a smile that was distinctly mocking.

"Charmed," Charles grunted. "Do you think you can help me get our shelter set up?"

"I'm pretty sure I can manage," Erik said dryly. "I'm an engineer."

Charles hoped that wasn't posturing.

Between the two of them they got the shelter set up, although it meant that, to stay out of the sun, they would have to stay in close quarters, on the benches at the stern; Erik's skin did not look like it would fare much better in the sun than Charles's. The sun still sat low in the east, and with their bow pointed – Charles hoped – westward back to land, they had to sit fairly close together. With far more politeness than Charles credited him, Erik shifted as far away on the bench as he could, and didn't make a move for the oar.

His mother's scandalized voice clamored in the back of Charles's head, worrying about _impropriety_ and what would Mrs. Talbot say if she could see Charles in pajama pants and t-shirt canoodling with a strange alpha. Sharon's fretting over his virtue had come to nothing, after Charles had gone on suppressants and gone off to Harvard, the former of which a properly-raised omega did not do and the latter of which was supposed to be the final skim of schooling to make him attractive to the sort of alpha who spent all day at the office. An alpha like Erik, Charles supposed, who looked every inch the kind of alpha omegas were supposed to fawn over, all steel-cut lines and strength.

A glance at Erik's neck showed he wasn't mated. No mating collar, and no pale strip of skin to show he'd taken it off, either to sleep or cheat on the omega he'd left behind. He didn't have the complex mix of scents that suggested he'd been paired, although all Charles could smell was salt and the eye-stinging mineral scent of the ocean. Charles quickly looked away.

The boat bobbed on the long rollers, its bow occasionally smacking into a deeper trough.

"You said you were an engineer?" Charles asked, when the silence became too great.

"Yeah," Erik said. He glanced at Charles, his eyes lazy and narrowed against the sun. "You said you were a doctor."

To his credit, Erik didn't adopt the faintly wondering tone most alphas did when finding out an omega had an advanced degree. It allowed Charles to answer, with less impatience than usual, "Genetics and biophysics. I research at Columbia."

"The company I work for developed processors for supercomputers," Erik said. "Specifically for genome sequencing."

"I might have spent time with some of your machines," Charles said, and marveled that here he was, in the middle of the Pacific, talking gene sequencing with an alpha.

Perhaps, as long as they were rescued in a timely manner, this wouldn't be completely nightmarish.


	16. The Brotherhood of Fruitants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Erik, it doesn’t have to be this way!” Charles rolled after Erik, dodging the debris cast aside by humans. He shuddered, his insides feeling a bit pulpy as he remembered what had happened to Director Stryker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Uh, they're genetically-modified fruits.
> 
> First, this is cygnaut’s fault for tagging [this post](http://iteribidem.tumblr.com/post/44272261947/all-four-cheekbones-facts-i-just-made-up) with #au in which erik is a genetically modified berry.
> 
> Second, this is also the fault of #xmentales chat.
> 
> Third, the Brotherhood of Fruitants is [Ces](http://codenamecesare.tumblr.com/)’s brilliant invention.

“Erik, it doesn’t have to be this way!” Charles rolled after Erik, dodging the debris cast aside by humans. He shuddered, his insides feeling a bit pulpy as he remembered what had happened to Director Stryker.

Of course, Stryker had planned on juicing all of them, running tests on their skin and flesh, and Charles would have fought to the bitter end to stop that, but what Erik had done to him… Charles hadn’t known you could get that much juice out of a human.

“I have to do this,” Erik said. He didn’t stop his determined rolling and Charles, ungainly strawberry that he was, had to roll even faster to catch up, nearly tripping over a discarded cigarette butt.

Along the way from the Eff-Dee-Ay torture chambers to this dirty human street, Erik had somehow acquired an array of metal weapons and a fanatical following: a large Bing cherry that could disappear and reappear at will, a boysenberry that drifted along on its own private breeze, a fluttering dragonfruit, a white Chardonnay grape… and worst of all, Charles’s innocent blueberry sister, Raven, who rolled along in Erik’s shadow.

“You’ve had your revenge, Erik!” Charles said. The blackberry ignored him. “Stryker paid for what he did to the rest of your bush, but not all humans are like him! They’ll accept mutant fruits among them, surely, if we just give them time, and the appropriate labeling and study citations, to get used to us!”

“Look around you, Charles!” Erik shouted. He ground to a halt, waving his metal weapons furiously. “Open your eyes! The humans will never accept us; all they want is to eat us and juice us and crush us, when we should be the ones ruling! Why should we live and die according to their whims?”

“Erik,” Charles tried again. He tried to remind Erik of what they meant to each other; ever since he had been a flower he’d longed for the sort of connection he’d found so effortlessly with Erik. He’d always hoped they might work out a way to graft on to each other one day. “Erik, please, we should find a space separate from the humans, not try to annihilate—”

“They’ll never let us be!” Erik shouted. He did an awful lot of shouting, even for a blackberry. “Brothers, sisters, let us all join together to combat the human menace…. let us form the Brotherhood of Fruitants!”

The other fruits cheered.

Charles despaired.

“I want you by my side,” Erik said, turning to Charles. “Please, Charles. We want the same thing.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Charles whispered, broken-hearted, “we do not.”

“Very well then,” Erik said bitterly. The betrayal on his face hurt worse than when Charles had immobilized Stryker long enough for Erik to secure their release. “When the humans come to turn you into a pie or stuff you into the maws of their idiot children, don’t blame me. Goodbye, Charles.”

“Goodbye, Erik,” Charles said, and watched as the newly-formed Brotherhood of Fruitants disappeared, leaving him alone in the sand and grit on the human sidewalk.


	17. Blind date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The top half screams ‘First Communion’ and the bottom says ‘secretly a middle-aged man with a mortgage.” Raven stopped inflicting her sartorial opinion to holler down to her room for Angel, who came rushing in to witness Charles’s humiliation. “Honestly,” Raven continued, her face blue and censorious in Charles’s mirror, “at least unbutton a couple of buttons. Show some throat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Vaguely college/university-ish AU. Charles is very earnest.
> 
> Inspired by [this photo](http://pearlo.tumblr.com/post/14247904762/equally-distracted-by-hair-and-crotch-also-this) and pearlo's observation that this looks like bb!Charles getting ready for a blind date. So guess what had to be done.

“OH my god, Charles, tell me you’re not going in _that_.”

_That_ was a perfectly respectable grey suit jacket, a perfectly respectable white button-down, and slightly less-than-respectable jeans. Charles nodded and buttoned up the last button on his collar, and ran a quick hand through his hair.

“The top half screams ‘First Communion’ and the bottom says ‘secretly a middle-aged man with a mortgage.” Raven stopped inflicting her sartorial opinion to holler down to her room for Angel, who came rushing in to witness Charles’s humiliation. “Honestly,” Raven continued, her face blue and censorious in Charles’s mirror, “at least unbutton a couple of buttons. Show some throat.”

“I feel it’s best to hedge my bets,” Charles explained. “This is a blind date, not meeting my future husband.” Aside from his name and promises that he was “more than acceptable,” Emma had been maddeningly vague about the person she’d set him up with. “He’s probably a desperate sciences student with no life and no social skills—”

“Oh so like you,” Angel said. Both she and Raven laughed immoderately.

“— and, as usual, he’ll panic about me being a telepath or turn out to be greasy or disappointing in some way,” Charles finished. “So I’ve decided to take a calculated risk: If they can get past this and the telepathy, then we can have a second date. And if not, I won’t have to… to fend them off or anything.”

“Unless they go for that ‘sixteen-year-old showing up for his college interview’ look,” Angel said. Raven mentally added something about _choir boy_ that earned her a reproving look.

“You are far too jaded for eighteen,” Raven sighed. Angel gave a thought to unbuttoning that top button, but refrained when she saw Charles’s face. “Have it your way, then. I hope they don’t turn out to be too much of a weirdo.”

* * *

Frazetta’s did a brisk trade in acceptable Italian and excellent wine. Really, Charles thought as he perused the wine list, it was of much higher quality than the actual food. One mental scan of the clientele suggested why: the furtive pair meeting for an assignation in the corner (Frazetta’s was nowhere near their usual haunts, and none of their friends—all being married—came here), the cluster of bored regulars at the bar, a fistful of college boys hoping to impress their partners into becoming boyfriends or girlfriends. It was less a restaurant than a strange, awkward sexual clearinghouse.

Once again, he cursed Emma’s persuasiveness and his own morbid curiosity. Emma—crystal, of course, because she was a sadist—had nearly beaten him into the ground with descriptions about how much he would like “my friend Erik.” When Charles had pointed out Emma didn’t have friends, she had minions, Emma had gone on about tall, brooding, handsome (right up your alley, Charles), metallokinetic, “and I know he does things with computers, but I bet you’ll get along _wonderfully_. So just go on one date with him and promise I can plan your wedding.”

Charles checked his watch. Nearly seven. A knot of people pushed through the doors, bringing cold and snowmelt with them. Charles searched for someone a few degrees removed from Emma’s short catalogue of “Erik’s” virtues—someone on the shorter side, badly-knotted tie,hair slicked with too much product (that had been Azazel, and Azazel was a friend now)—and thought wistfully about the tall, handsome newcomer who was looming over the receptionist and seemed to be ready to interrogate her about the availability of a table.

Charles was so busy speculating on how Tall Dark and Terrifying might look out of his maroon turtleneck that he nearly missed the hostess guiding TDT through the sea of tables. Where she could be going, Charles had no idea; the few nearby booths were occupied by couples busy with each other. A threesome? There _had_ been that one time Emma had set him up with a couple-that-was-already-a-couple. Darwin and Alex were good friends now.

“Here you are!” the hostess chirped. For reasons Charles could not fathom, she winked at him before heading off.

TDT was, up close, still tall, dark, and terrifying. Determination nearly poured off him, laced through with a bit of rueful resignation and other things Charles didn’t examine too closely. He had gingery-brown hair and grey eyes, a face fine-chiseled and sharp under his end-of-day stubble. Charles very much wanted to touch it.

“You must be Charles,” said TDT. He had an accent.

He was using the accent to talk to Charles.

“You have an absolutely _fascinating_ mutation,” Charles said. “Several, actually.”

It occurred to him that a normal person would have said _yes, and you must be Erik, it’s so good to meet you_ and he would even have understood _yes, and you must be Erik, and would you mind terribly if I climbed you like a tree?_ and that he should be trying to act like a normal person. But somehow his mouth had disengaged from his brain and just started _talking_.

“Did you know,” his mouth said, while somewhere in the backseat Charles’s reason shouted for it to stop, “that blue eyes likely first arose from a mutation in the 86th intron of the HERC2 gene? HERC2 is adjacent to OCA2, and that mutation affected the expression of OCA2 in the human iris. Now, what does this have to do with your lovely grey eyes, you ask? Well, OCA2 encodes—”

“Yes,” said Tall Dark and Terrifying Erik. “Do you mind if I sit down first?”

“No.” Charles’s mouth chose that moment to reconnect with his brain and snapped shut. Mercifully, Frazetta’s lighting scheme favored dim, green-shaded lamps and flickering candles, so the blush creeping across his face would (please god) not be too excruciatingly visible. “I mean, yes, sorry, please. Please sit down.”

“If you insist,” Erik murmured, and folded himself into the other chair.

Erik felt warm. Amused, a bit baffled. _Charmed_. Charles didn’t dare look to see if it was the kind of charmed experienced by aunts or old ladies confronted with an adorably precocious child.

“So,” Charles said into the silence, “what brings —” _goddammit, Xavier_ , “did Emma threaten you with blackmail, too?”

“No,” Erik said, scowling down at his menu.

“That’s nice.” Charles picked up his own menu, hoping that, if he stared at the Specialties section long enough, the description of the chicken parmesan might offer the key to his salvation. God, Erik was doing devastating things to his hormones. “Uh, what do you study?”

“At the moment, genetics apparently,” Erik said. His long, thin mouth curved upward in a smile that might be teasing. Charles’s blush chose that moment to remanifest itself. “But, when not learning about OAC2, I’m in physics.”

“OCA2,” Charles corrected. “And what kind?”

“Why?” Erik asked, OCA2-inhibited eyes narrowing.

“Um, because it’s the kind of question that gets asked on dates?” Hot _and_ socially awkward. Well, no one bats a thousand, Charles reminded himself.

“Quantum.”

“Lovely,” Charles said with what he suspected was far too much earnestness.

Mercifully, their waitress materialized at Charles’s elbow. As Charles looked up to give his drink order, he caught the edge of something on Erik’s face, something warm and appraising, that stayed long enough for a shiver of interest to work its way down Charles’s spine.


	18. Lifeboat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unlike most sentient shipsystems, MAGNUS lacks the imperative against taking human-class life. The battleship hums with threat, the heads-up display—now, with the stasis visor off, projected directly into his visual cortex—indicating weapons at the ready. More data scrolls past, MAGNUS considering and discounting likely sources of origin, trajectories, the probabilities behind events that would set a lifepod adrift in deep space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: pre-C/E, space AU. No real warnings, but some experimentation referred to. MAGNUS is an actual acronym, but I forgot for what.
> 
> Inspired by oh my god [this exquisite gifset](http://because-xaviers.tumblr.com/post/33214406229/such-an-exquisite-being). (Although in my head Erik doesn't have David's tragically blond hair, and also he is not an android.)

The Atlantine Sea is ten sleep-years long. The first thing he sees on the visor above his stasis chamber is that only seven years, two hundred-ninety days have passed. The second is the flashing red light in the corner of the display that tells him MAGNUS’s sensors have detected something.

_Distress beacon with life signs_ , MAGNUS says to the transponder implanted behind Erik’s ear. His voice is soft, modulated in deference to Erik’s sleep-addled nervous system. _Unknown origins. The black box is encrypted. Recommend retrieval or termination._

Unlike most sentient shipsystems, MAGNUS lacks the imperative against taking human-class life. The battleship hums with threat, the heads-up display—now, with the stasis visor off, projected directly into his visual cortex—indicating weapons at the ready. More data scrolls past, MAGNUS considering and discounting likely sources of origin, trajectories, the probabilities behind events that would set a lifepod adrift in deep space.

“Could Shaw be involved?” Erik asks. It’s the only probability he’s interested in. His legs still shake as he trots down the corridor to _Magda_ ’s cargo bay. The stasis field, for all that it’s frozen his body at thirty-three waking years, can’t keep his muscle tone perfect; the human body still has a loathing of such complete stillness.

“Negative,” MAGNUS tells him, sounding wry enough that Erik wants to laugh. “The telemetry included with the distress beacon suggests a trajectory not compatible with _Caspartina_ ’s known jump coordinates. And no explosives or biologicals detected, aside from the occupant.”

“Transfer to screen, then,” Erik says. The wall screen in the cargo office flickers to life, the ship’s exterior cameras focused on a small, slim tube. The lifepod hovers against the infinite black, against a backdrop of stars. “Can you tell me anything else?”

“The occupant scans as metahuman,” MAGNUS says.

Hope surges in Erik’s chest, keen and heady and the clearest thing he’s felt since easing out of stasis. He hasn’t met one like him in almost fifteen waking-years, not since the Exodus from Terra—no, not since he had seen Shaw, but he refuses to think of himself being in any way like Shaw at all.

“Bring it in then,” Erik orders. “Standard decontamination procedures.”

He paces and growls through the procedure, watching the office display as MAGNUS ticks through the interminable checklist. In the echoing hold of the cargo bay the lifepod is a tiny thing, the irregularities of its surface drawn out by the lights. It is opaque, no windows, heavily shielded against the radiation that came along with the interstellar winds the pod would use to aid propulsion. In one corner of the display, MAGNUS’s read on the pod’s life signs remains steady, although neurological activity remains bizarrely blank.

“The neuro readout is also shielded,” MAGNUS says. “I could perhaps hack the firewall, but I would not recommend it.”

Anything could be on the other side of opening that pod, its occupant in a coma or raving mania or perfect sanity. Erik arms himself with a few small metallic projectiles—no guns, not in the buffered confines of the bay—and approaches the space-chilled hulk of the pod.

Without warning, one segment of the pod’s carapace pops open, a hiss of escaping steam like the hiss of a dragon. Erik nearly lashes out, the fear too acute not to react; he recalls the needles just in time.

“Vital signs remain stable,” MAGNUS reports. “Stasis field generator is depowering.”

The steam clears. Weapons at the ready, Erik steps forward, and when the last of the fog vanishes, he sees the metahuman lying there, pale, stasis-slender, with the loose muscles of a body in sleep.

_Such an exquisite being_. Shaw had said those words to him once, to a terrified eleven-year-old boy. He hears the words now in his own voice, stunned, his thoughts revolving around _metahuman_ and _strange_ and _dangerous_ and _beautiful_.

The metahuman is young in body, maybe twenty-five waking years at the most, and, at least superficially, male. Although stasis has smoothed his muscles down, there is something to him that suggests strength and completeness, a being that has grown into itself. Brown hair cut short, although on its way to being long, freckles washed out by lack of sunlight. With the breathing mask and visor having swung away, Erik can see his face, which is fine-chiseled with a bold nose and more freckles, and red lips parted softly, tantalizingly in sleep.

_Tactile stimulation is desirable after the discontinuation of stasis_ , MAGNUS says to the subaural feed. It’s this—and only this, not years of inhabiting either stasis or revenge—that has Erik running a finger down the young man’s arm, the responsive muscles of his chest. Under his touch the young man shifts, breath deepening and quickening.

He should move back, Erik knows. To be caught leaning over the lifepod as if entranced, as if wanting… He braces himself to step away but before he can a strange new voice arrests him, speaking with a clarity that Erik has never heard.

_Hello_ says the voice in his head that isn’t MAGNUS as stasis-glazed eyes flicker open. They are blue, blue beyond description. _Hello, Erik Lehnsherr_.


	19. Someday the waves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Erik had known this land of safety and milk and honey was guarded by an extortionate Oceanid, he might have reconsidered stopping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: preish-C/E (although Charles has probably made up his mind already), mermaid AU. Charles is pushy.
> 
> Inspired by [this piece of art](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9od90fzPg1rrecqio1_500.jpg) and the simultaneous enabling of Syn and Prof. The title is from the Iron and Wine song of the same name.

The first time Erik saw the merman—excuse him, the Oceanid, since some people were fussy about it—he’d had to trade a copy of a book on navigation and his least-favorite novel in exchange for passage out of the bay.

The bay in question was a cove, a refuge large enough for the _Lodestone_ to maneuver but sheltered on the lee side of the storm winds that had driven the ship there in the first place. Its blue waters lapped at the skirts of a white-sand beach, which in turn rose up into the relics of volcanic cliffs. And down those cliffs, returning to the sea, tumbled freshwater streams, their headwaters flowing past coconut trees and fruit trees of every description, and large birds roosted in those trees and drank from the streams and fish played in them.

If Erik had known this land of safety and milk and honey was guarded by an extortionate Oceanid, he might have reconsidered stopping. Never mind that the extortionate Oceanid was all lovely pale, freckle-spattered skin on top and crystalline, complex pelagian blue below. He had brown hair that dried to a wild tumble if he stayed out of the water too long to talk, and blue eyes more remarkable than his home waters.

“You would not have reconsidered,” Charles said in response to Erik saying a heavily-edited version of what he actually thought. He hung awkwardly over the dinghy’s gunwale, his tail smacking against the water and damp fingers flicking aside the pages of Erik’s latest offering. (It was a natural history of the British Isles.) “You’ve been back here three times, not including this one. And besides, I always give your books back.”

Charles had a peculiar gift with silences. He would say something, like digging out a scoop of mud at the edge of a tidal pool, and Erik’s thoughts would rush in to fill the empty place. 

So now he thought about how, on that first return, he had given Charles a ladies’ magazine and a short story collection. The second he had given a history of Rome’s naval battles and his third-favorite novel. The third time he had bought a book of Greek mythology especially for Charles and, with some hesitation, a copy of the Tanach.

In return, that third time, Charles had given him a flute and said, if he played it while sailing the seas around “the southernmost mountains in the great waters”—Cape Horn, Erik ascertained, after showing Charles a map—the dolphins would guide him through the shoals and reefs.

From that first time, by Charles’s admission, the Oceanid had been fascinated by him. Why he’d been fascinated by a tall man, skin like driftwood and tendons like hemp rope, Erik had no idea. But one minute he had gone with a landing party to the shore and the next a brown, curious head popped up over the dinghy’s bow and, after Erik had calmed his hysterical crew with threats and given his own name, had introduced himself as something soft and hissing that Erik had interpreted as Charles.

They would talk while the ship sat in anchorage, Erik of the “dry world” and Charles of his territory, which extended out of the cove and into the waters for miles around. He had fabulous treasure buried away in caves and vents, his own gathered from around the world, and some hoarded by his family. He seemed puzzled by the concept of ‘banks’ and why Erik would trust another person to watch his treasure, which Charles reckoned was obtained in raids and forays against enemies of Erik’s creche-kin or those who wanted his territory. Vengeance and honor seemed to be beyond him, so Erik had agreed that Schmidt the Privateer was the water-enemy of Erik’s creche and he chased the man over the greater and lesser waters to strip away his treasure.

It wasn’t a perfect understanding, and Charles, tail twitching agitatedly, would say Erik looked past the age where he ought to have settled in his own territory.

“I don’t have a territory,” Erik had said. This had been the last time, the third time, he’d returned, with _Lodestone_ ’s masts half-shot away and an insidious leak beneath the waterline that resisted patching. Schmidt’s work, of course. He and Charles had talked for weeks while the crew put _Lodestone_ together.

“You are not creche-kin,” Charles had said with his curious decisiveness, “and so this cannot be Territory for you. But still, come back when you can. You will have safe coasting in my creche-waters.” He’d said that with a warmth that touched his strange voice more and more frequently and lit up an answering warmth in Erik’s chest.

Of course, he had still reminded Erik that, if he didn’t get some new books, he would have his whale friend crush the _Lodestone_ the second it ventured into open water. Charles had, apparently, befriended the whale calf on his youthful journeys through the oceans and had brought him, and many treasures, back to his family’s territory here in the warm waters. The whale seemed to stick around as a sort of giant watchdog.

“It doesn’t do to be seen going soft. The ocean is not kind,” Charles said this time. Of course, Erik thought, and watched as Charles touched the natural history and Erik’s favorite novel with the narwhal tusk and sang the spell that would preserve them from disintegrating. “And here.”

He tucked the books into the satchel around his broad, pale shoulders and, with an utter lack of ceremony, took the coral necklace off from around his neck and handed it to Erik.

“If you sail down near the frozen places, drop this in the water and you’ll be allowed safe passage,” he said, and while Erik marveled at the rich red and green, the delicate limbs twined together around a bit of twine, he kissed Erik on the mouth, cool and salty, and flipped back into the water and was gone with a swish of his powerful tail.


	20. 24 short pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 24 snippets from a Tumblr "first-lines challenge" in which people gave me the first line of a fic and I wrote a snippety-type thing for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on these: As said, 24 short (about 500 words) snippets from Tumblr prompts. They run the gamut; warnings/advertisements are posted in bold at the beginning of each fic, so you can skip down to something more your speed.

**1\. For queenofshenanigans: Goes unspoken [dystopia, experimentation, not always mutants]**

"I know we’re not supposed to talk about what really happened." A long pause. "But thank you."

"You’re welcome." It didn’t seem like quite the right phrase, but Erik could think of nothing else to say. Nothing sat right. The world was different. He shivered at the sensation—new, not unwelcome, but strange—of the metal in Charles’s bed, his IV stand, the legs of his chair. Beyond that: the metal in other rooms, in the building, the city, stretching on and on in thousands of permutations.

Charles winced and rubbed his forehead. "I don’t suppose the… our friends gave you any helpful hints on what to do if one of their…" _Test subjects_ , Charles said in his strange, silent voice, "… can’t stop hearing voices?"

"No," Erik said softly. The CIA had, for reasons of its own—or maybe Charles’s reasons, Erik had no idea—agreed to let them go, subject to their agreement to live under government surveillance. As far as they knew, Erik could flip coins, Charles could pick up emotions and thoughts if he concentrated hard enough. The full extent of Essex’s experiments (the success of his experiments) would never be known, and the packed suitcases waiting in his car, the fake IDs in his glove compartment, said Erik was determined to keep it that way.

"Help me up then," Charles murmured. He pulled the IV out with a wince. "The sooner we’re on the road, the better."

"The better," Erik agreed, and handed a bag of street clothes to Charles, who took them.

* * *

**2\. For fealle: the 1001 Nights of Charles Francis Xavier [modern AU]**

"I needed to re-enact a scene from this porno in order to save our skins, and miracle of miracles, it worked."

The rest of the room bursts into laughter, and Sean wolf-whistles approvingly. Erik winces and tries to laugh, but he’s not really the laughing type, and anyway, _The 1001 Nights of Charles Francis Xavier_ , wears on him after a while. It reminds him that some people, like Charles Francis Xavier, enjoy sex and actively seek it out. Erik likes sex, as far as it goes, but either he’s had disappointing sex or just better things to do with his life, because he doesn’t get the same charge out of it Charles seems to.

And it’s certainly not because he’s jealous that Charles has slept with everyone on the damn campus except for him. He doesn’t examine that thought too deeply, and swallows it down along with his beer.

Denial doesn’t explain, though, why his heart kicks against his ribcage when Charles looks over at him and smiles, or why, over and over again, he gives himself up to Charles’s gravitational pull and falls into orbit around him.

* * *

**3\. For our-girl-friday: Monotremes [they are echidnas this time]**

"Pardon me if I’m slow on the uptake, but is there a particular reason we have an echidna in the living room?"

"Oh, it’s Hank’s. Don’t let it out." Alex made sure Darwin closed the baby gate behind him. "And don’t get too close, it has claws and isn’t afraid to use them."

"Saying it’s Hank’s only answers part of the question," Darwin pointed out. "So, why is Hank’s echidna in our living room?"

"Uh, he had to go out of town and his usual babysitter was sick. Also, it’s echidnas," Alex corrected, much to Darwin’s alarm. "That’s Charles over by the baby gate. He’s nice. Erik is probably waiting under something so he can ambush you. So you might wanna hop up here before he does. That motherfucker has some serious spines."

Darwin leaped up onto the couch, and just in time: something small, swift-moving, and spiny shot out from underneath the couch, making for where Darwin had been standing not seconds earlier. The blur slowed and resolved into, well, an echidna, which glowered horribly at the two of them from underneath its spiny forelock… and then moved to position itself in the narrow space between the couch and the baby gate. Charles, the other echidna, waddled over and poked at Erik with his snout. Erik made a low grumbling sound and appeared to ignore him.

"I hope neither of us have to get up soon," Darwin said.

Erik hissed, puffing his spines out menacingly.

"Nope," Alex said, turning back to the TV. "I’m good."

* * *

**4\. For codenamecesare: Disputations [kidfic, bb!Charles and Erik]**

"Give me back my zebra," sulked Charles.

"You give me back my robot," retorted Erik.

Technically, Erik was two years older (and bigger and stronger and, because he was two years older, smarter) than Charles and should be able to get his robot back somehow. His abilities hadn’t developed enough to allow him to move much more than quarters or, on a good day, the small metal blocks his mother kept around. Still, he tugged petulantly on the robot, which only made Charles clutch it more tightly to him.

 _Give me back my zebra!_ Charles insisted.

Quite a large part of Erik didn’t want to give Charles’s zebra back, but another part… wanted to. In fact, that part had him wordlessly holding out the zebra for Charles to take.

Then, all of a sudden, Erik’s lap was full of Charles, who was warm and a bit sweaty, and _crying_ of all things, even though Erik had told him crying was ridiculous. Erik put his arms around Charles, because hugging seemed to help, but Charles only cried harder and sniffled pathetically into Erik’s neck.

 _I’m sorry sorry sorry,_ Charles said to Erik’s mind. _I didn’t mean to do that sorry I’m so sorry please say you won’t stay mad, Erik, please._

"I don’t know what you’re—" And then he _did_ know, maybe because Charles told him silently or he’d worked it out on his own: Charles had _told_ him to give his zebra back, and Erik hadn’t wanted to, had in fact thought _no not gonna_ , but he’d offered the zebra back anyway. Because Charles had wanted it that way.

Fear tried to sink into him before he pushed it aside. Charles is your friend, he reminded himself, because Charles had been his friend ever since Erik had shown up as The New Kid in third grade, and Charles had been the six-year-old twerp who’d skipped two grades, and it had been Charles-And-Erik against the world since then.

Maybe, Erik thought speculatively, Charles could mind-control their obnoxious classmates into getting into a fight in the sandpit, or falling off the monkey bars.

 _No!_ Charles’s voice was a hot denial in Erik’s head. He shoved at Erik’s shoulder, but it was a playful shove. _Be serious, Erik! I really am sorry._

 _I know,_ Erik said, and hugged Charles again, until Charles’s breathing steadied, the robot dangling from his hand and bonking gently against Erik’s back.

* * *

**5\. For pearlo: Unread messages [epistolary?, ambiguous ending]**

There were ten missed calls and twenty-seven unread text messages on Erik’s phone. Sighing, Erik ignored the indignant reminder that the battery was still low and keyed in his password.

He began with the text messages.

_I hope you have a lovely day <3 _

_Don’t scare the interns too badly._

_Who schedules faculty meetings for eight am and not order doughnuts at least?_

_There is not enough tea in the world to make Shaw tolerable; he’s the world’s worst department chair._

_Lecture went very well… probably because I got to hear myself talk, as you like to say ;)_

_I’ve got a conference call with LA this afternoon, don’t send me sexy texts like you did last time._

_Thank you for refraining from texting me… I think ;)_

_I had lunch with Moira and she wants me to remind you ‘you’re still fighting,’ whatever that means._

_Sometimes lab assistants are more trouble than they’re worth._

_Might be a bit late tonight, these results need going over._

_I hope you like the falafel._

_Did you like the falafel?_

_You haven’t responded, I hope I didn’t poison you._

_Are you mad about the falafel?_

_Man cannot live on the flesh of savaged graduate students alone._

_Since you’re allergic to your cell phone Angel wants me to remind you that you rescheduled her dissertation meeting for tomorrow._

_Second and last class of the day!!_

_FYI I’ll be late, could you pick up dinner?_

_Addendum to last message: Chinese sounds really good (hint hint)._

_Addendum to addendum: And wine, lots of it._

_Sometimes I think it’s like students live in Opposite World, where they do the precise opposite of what I want._

_I’m going to put in one hour on these results and then I’ll head home._

_Can’t wait to see you, darling._

_Maybe we can have sex tonight._

_Oh I forgot: I need to get petrol, so I’ll be even later._

_Finally, victory!_

_I’ll see you soon, my love._

Erik keyed in his password for his mail and set the phone to speaker.

"First message," said the impersonal female voice, and then Charles:

"Hello, dearest. I’m sure you’ve accidentally-on-purpose forgotten your phone or forgotten to charge it, but if by some miracle you haven’t, could you make sure Raven packs a lunch that isn’t entirely sugar?"

 _Second new message._ "Oh, did I forget to mention that I love you? Because I do! I hope Azazel is eavesdropping; you’re adorable when you blush and growl at the same time."

 _Third new message._ "Ugh, I just got a call from the accountant. Did you send in that pension paperwork? She needs it for the taxes. Love you."

 _Fourth new message._ "Now I know you’re avoiding your phone. Honestly, Erik, it’s not the devil’s technology; you’d think an engineer wouldn’t actively be afraid of it. Anyway, I hope I didn’t kill you with the falafel. Love you!"

 _Fifth new message._ "You’re a coward, Lehnsherr—hey, Charl—!—I’m sorry, love, that was Moira. I think she isn’t angry enough and needs to get into another one of your arguments. I do love you, though."

 _Sixth new message._ "Finally done! I hope you got the texts about the Chinese, wine, and sex. I’ll see you soon, darling."

 _Seventh new message._ "Yes, Mr. Lehnsherr, this is Marianne Whitelock, a nurse at Mercy General. This number was listed as the emergency contact for Charles Xavier. If you could please call me back at 555-7203 as soon as possible? Thank you."

 _Eighth new message._ "Erik, it’s Raven. Where the fuck are you? Please, I just, I got this call from like the university? I have no idea. It’s Charles, he got hit, or something. There was a helicopter? Like I don’t even know. Just, please, please call me or come to the hospital or something, okay?"

 _Ninth new message._ "Mr. Lehnsherr, this is Dr. Mark Cordero at Mercy. You may be here already, but in case you aren’t, please come down or return my call as soon as possible. Thank you."

 _Tenth new message._ "Erik, it’s Raven. Where the fuck are you? I’ll try your email, just please, please get here soon."

* * *

**6\. For astasia: Courtship rituals [A/O, humor; related to but not really in[The Life of Ω](http://archiveofourown.org/works/674013/chapters/1288397)]**

"Erik… what did you do?" Charles asked, curling in the corner of the boat. "The hyena… You killed the hyena!"

"It was going to hurt you, Charles," Erik said. Alone in the ocean, only the alpha and the omega, and the hyena had been hidden in the bottom of the boat, angry, stressed and hungry. It had been either the hyena dying or Erik and Charles, and Erik had much preferred it be the hyena.

Besides, it was impressive, a display of Erik’s prowess as hunter and protector. He thoughtfully licked the hyena’s blood from his lips and fingers. Charles looked vaguely nauseous.

"I get that you think it’s supposed to make me swoon or whatever, but seriously, it’s just disturbing," Charles said. "And now we have a dead hyena."

"We could eat it," Erik pointed out. Meat was meat, although carnivore meat was tough and not terribly appetizing, particularly uncooked. Charles swallowed. He had a nice throat, Erik noticed. Very biteable. "The longer we can keep from eating our rations, the better off we’ll be. And we need to keep our strength up." He needed to, to keep Charles safe from ocean predators, and Charles needed to keep his strength up for… other things, maybe, if Erik could convince him of his suitability as a mate.

Charles raised his oar, as if sensing the direction of Erik’s thoughts. At the moment the hyena’s carcass lay between them, blood dripping from the slashing wound in its neck. Erik considered it, and then considered the danger presented by the oar. Charles was very determined and very strong.

"I won’t hurt you," Erik said after a moment. "I don’t… I’m not like that."

"Really?" Charles’s eyebrow arched eloquently, dimensions of disbelief and sarcasm. "You alphas have a one-track mind. You’re not mated," a tilt of his chin indicated the lack of collar around Erik’s neck, "which says either you’re terrible mate material, you’re not interested in settling down, or both… and both of which mean you just want sex. And you’ll forgive me if I’d rather devote my energy to surviving the Pacific Ocean than… than _courtship_."

"Naturally," Erik huffed. Honestly, sex and survival were incompatible, and he’d much rather survive the Pacific Ocean as well. "I’m talking about after."

"Oh my god," said Charles. "See, this is exactly what I was talking about."

"What?" Erik asked.

"Never mind." Charles sighed. "Just… just do something about the hyena. It’s going to start smelling. You can think of it as a further demonstration of your alphaist prowess. Or something."

"Okay," Erik said, and flexed his muscles. Charles sighed again.

* * *

**7\. For afrocurl: There was a boy from Gallifrey [Doctor Who nights, nostalgia]**

"You’re always confused by this show," Charles said as he stared at the image of Mark Sheppard in the TARDIS and Erik looked blankly at the screen.

"I’m not confused by this show," Erik said, electing to ignore the fact that Charles had just finished explaining why the Doctor and his three helper-people were back in 1969 and it made even less sense than before Erik had asked. "I’m confused by why you like this show. Is it because the main character wears tweed? Because he has his doctorate? What?"

Charles dug a retaliatory elbow into Erik’s ribs and Erik squirmed away. On the floor in front of them Raven made an impatient hissing noise and said, "Shut up, Mark Sheppard is being hot on my TV screen."

"It’s Netflix," Erik protested.

"Hey, you wanted to be here for _Doctor Who_ night, this is what happens," Raven said. "Now shut up before I make you."

Erik pretended like he knew what was going on as the characters wandered through a ramshackle orphanage haunted by greyish aliens with bulbous heads that looked like a bad drug trip and then ended up in something that looked like a warehouse and the astronaut came back. At some point the blue police box was involved, but Erik’s head had started to hurt.

Mercifully the episode ended and Raven set the PlayStation on pause to go find more wine and popcorn. Erik reminded himself he had Charles plastered warmly against his side, both of them snuggled under an afghan, and this was a Good Thing, worth enduring nonsensical television for.

"So why do you like this, anyway?" he asked.

"Oh, I wanted so badly to be the Doctor when I was little," Charles said. "My father and I would watch it together—it was meant to appeal to children, although my mother hated it—and I would pretend that I was the Doctor. Only I didn’t have a TARDIS, so I had to use my bedroom closet." He sighed, a wistful sound that, briefly, made Erik guilty for poking fun at his favorite show. "Of course, it went off the air when I was only ten, so it’s hardly like I grew up with it."

Erik rubbed at Charles’s shoulder and tried to ignore the stench of freshly-burnt popcorn coming from the kitchen, along with Raven’s cry of rage. "Who’s your favorite Doctor? Or are all they technically the same?"

"They say your first Doctor is your favorite," Charles laughed. He leaned up into Erik, nuzzling into the crook of his neck. "But I am quite fond of Nine… I do like a man who knows how to wear a leather jacket."

"Really?" Erik asked. He turned his head for a kiss and got it, and Charles smiling against his lips. "I don’t suppose you want to be my companion, or whatever they’re called."

"I’m the Doctor," Charles reminded him, nipping at Erik’s mouth and still grinning his ridiculous, exuberant grin. "I have my doctorate and everything."

* * *

**8\. For trobador: In and out [inadvertent dating, drunkenness, Charles is a darling idiot]**

It is perfectly understandable to find oneself in bed with a handsome stranger come morning after an exuberant night out, but if one has ventured on said adventure with one’s sister Raven Darkholme, one should be ready for disappointment that said stranger had, in fact, slept with one’s sister and has only stumbled into one’s bed for a peaceful nap. Or it could be a clever ruse. Charles is too hungover to tell.

Two days later, after they’ve recovered, Raven takes him clubbing again. It’s making up for the past three years that Charles has spent giving birth to his dissertation, denying his true nature as an Xavier-Darkholme. There’s only so long one can deny that sort of thing—blood will out sooner or later, and if one of Charles’s natural habitats is the lab, the other is any place where alcohol is the most readily available liquid.

So it’s not entirely unexpected that he wakes up the next morning with an army pounding away in his head and a handsome stranger in his bed.

But it _is_ unexpected that the handsome stranger is the same one as last time. He’s out cold, snoring in a way that manages to be attractive. But he looks like the kind of person who’s attractive under any circumstances; even his mussed auburn hair, the lines at the corner of his eyes, and the dark circles of sleep-deprivation underneath them, have a certain Byronic drama.

He also, Charles suspects, may not actually exist. That morning he gets up to piss and do something to keep his head from falling off, and by the time he gets back handsome stranger has vanished.

Then it happens again.

And twice more.

By the fifth time, Charles knows the handsome stranger’s name is Erik Lehnsherr, although he learns that from the stranger’s driver’s license when he rifles through his trouser pockets and finds his wallet. Erik even looks good in his license photo, which is deeply unfair. He also looks good in his student ID card and the photo on his bank card. The same probably goes for his passport.

"So what’s wrong with him?" Charles asks Raven over Cheerios and Bloody Marys later that morning. She stares back at him blankly. "Handsome stranger? Does he sleep talk? Is he a somnophiliac?"

"Who are you talking about?" Raven asks. She gives Charles a look that suggested Charles might still be drunk.

"Him!" Charles points back in the direction of Raven’s bedroom, as if this might help; handsome stranger has, of course, vanished. "Because, admittedly I sleep very deeply, but aside from waking up with his face in the back of my neck—and aside from being in my bed in the first place—he doesn’t seem like he’s a complete creeper."

Raven delicately sets her spoon down. "Charles, I haven’t slept with handsome stranger."

"You… you mean," Charles gapes. "No intercourse."

"No intercourse," Raven confirms. "No coitus, no _in flagrante delicto_ , no anything."

"Then how..?" Because fate would not be that cruel, to arrange circumstances so that Charles had a lithe, handsome stranger in his bed five nights in a row and not actually remember anything about it.

"You kept calling him your ‘sober companion’ after he kept you from falling down the stairs outside of Club 23," Raven says patiently. "You guilted him into walking us home. And," she blows out a breath, "into our home. And then to your bed, just in case you got lost."

"Oh my god," Charles mumbles. "I didn’t."

"How did you get your doctorate again?" Raven asks witheringly. "Anyway, he just so happened to mention to me that he works as a bartender at Moliere’s. And he just so happens to have a shift there tonight."

"Oh my god," Charles says again.

"I hope you sober doesn’t scare him off," Raven says. She resumes eating her Cheerios, slurping at the milk in a way that, combined with his headache and the realization that handsome stranger Erik isn’t a figment of his imagination and is real, sends Charles’s stomach into a tailspin. Raven continues, "The only thing weirder than you drunk is you in your right mind."

That Raven is, of course, very right about this does not help.

* * *

**9\. For kageillusionz: That romantic-comedy feeling [silliness, poor Erik]**

"Can someone explain why my life suddenly feels like a romantic comedy?"

"Maybe it is," Charles says. "Shakespeare did say ‘all the world’s a stage.’ Although, of course, the image hardly originated with him."

Erik rolls his eyes. "It’s just… you don’t find it suspicious, the two of us meeting the way we did? You at the bar, relaxing, and I was supposed to be looking for my date, and we ended up going home together."

Charles hums and nods thoughtfully before he takes a sip of Scotch. Erik very much looks forward to kissing the taste off his mouth. It’s possible, he thinks, that the room is shifting out of focus, the edges blurring, the light becoming warmer, more intimate. If he concentrates, he’s pretty sure he could pick out a soundtrack in the background.

"And," Charles says, "a series of near-misses and chronic, inexplicable misunderstandings between two people who are actually very much of the same mind? And then you barging into that bar to declare your love in a very public place."

"Precisely," Erik says.

"Hm." Charles hums some more. "Perhaps that should be taken as evidence that your life is, contrary to your expectations, a romantic comedy. Perhaps there is someone up there," he waves his hand at the ceiling, "who is, even as we speak, writing down the words we say to each other and the actions we perform and the thoughts we think. Perhaps, in some other alternate universe, our lives are written by another author who puts us in space, or Viking Europe, or some terrible dystopic future. Perhaps, in those places, we aren’t human. A multiplicity of possibilities for us."

"So you posit that our God is Garry Marshall?"

"You would make a wonderful Julia Roberts, darling."

"Just my luck," Erik grumbles as he kisses the top of Charles’s head. God, how disgustingly sappy. "I was hoping for Ridley Scott."

* * *

**10\. For groovyphilia: x4x [dating, classifieds, oh boys]**

_Single male metalbender seeking telepath. PS. Very clean._

Usually browsing the x4x (mutant for mutant, m4m being already taken) was an exercise in futility. But Erik seemed promising at first glance. As advertised, he was single, very masculine, and a metallokinetic, and almost worryingly clean. Charles appreciated a certain amount of academic clutter in his life, but Erik’s apartment didn’t look like it would tolerate anything being a micron out of place.

"I hope," Charles began as they waited for the wine list and breadsticks, because Erik was way too good to be true, he _had_ to have some horrible, irredeemable flaw somewhere, "you’re not one of those people who fetishizes telepathy."

Erik rocked back a little in his seat, surprise wafting off him. Everything about him was tidy and sharp-edged, even his jeans had a peculiar kind of discipline to them. It was _precise_. Very German. Charles had skimmed over his mind briefly, and even that had the kind of engineering he associated with German cars, all straight-ahead efficiency and determination.

"Because," Charles continued, pausing only to accept his wine and banish the waiter, "usually people seeking telepaths want them to dig up all their secret kinks or look into their soul or what have you."

He didn’t sense any duplicity from Erik when Erik said, "I’m pretty open about my kinks," and oh that was a gratifyingly sharp-toothed smile. "And I’m mostly atheist, so I’m not worried about my soul."

"Chin chin," Charles said, and tipped his glass with a smile of his own. Erik responded with another wolfish grin and drank his wine in a way that gave Charles a nice view of his throat as he swallowed.

Erik’s bed was probably also neat, Charles decided. It would have sober grey sheets, a white duvet cover, hospital corners. The edges of the sheet would be turned down over the blanket, like in a hotel.

Charles would have to do something about that.

* * *

**11\. For daysofxavierspast: Battle strategy [Pokemon, bb!Charles and Erik]**

"Erik, could you let me win a Pokemon battle for once?" Charles sulks.

"You need to learn about strategy, Charles," Erik says for the thousandth time.

"That’s what chess is for." Charles gazes morosely down at his Pokeball, which now contains a rather bruised and befuddled Bulbasaur. "I just don’t get why we have to fightthem."

"It’s just what you do," Erik says. He’s the latest in a long line of Pokemon trainers; it’s in his blood: you get Pokemon and you go on adventures. In the hazy future Erik imagines for himself, he imagines himself and Charles with backpacks (Charles is still short, with impossible brown hair and bright blue eyes), and Charles stays by his side from town to town and victory to victory.

Unfortunately, Charles’s knowledge is much more academic. He likes raising Pokemon and taking care of them, and still gets upset when his dad sends yet another Oddish off with a new trainer.

"Look," Erik says gamely, "think of it as teaching. You’re good at that."

Charles heaves a sigh and the look on his face is nearly enough to make Erik cave and agree to go watch TV. He steels himself and says, "Here, let’s try your Vulpix and my Magikarp."

"If you insist," Charles says, sounding far more put-upon than any seven-year-old should, and releases the Vulpix.

"Vulpix!" says the Vulpix, and immediately curls up on Charles’s feet, wrapping its tails around Charles’s ankles, and goes to sleep.

There’s really nothing to do after that but leave Magickarp alone and sit on the sunny lawn of the estate, and maybe start to drowse against Charles’s shoulder.

* * *

**12\. For synekdokee: Visitations [dystopia, loss]**

The faded flowers on Charles’s grave were dry and fragile.

"I never thought I’d come here again, after the last time," Erik said to the headstone.

In this resting-place of the rich, flanked by the markers for Brian and Sharon Xavier, Charles’s grave was strangely plain marble, marked only with Charles’s name and a pair of dates. It had nothing else on it that marked what Charles had _been_ , as if stone could contain that: Raven’s annoying and protective older brother, genius, visionary, arrogant-smug-pain-in-the-ass and absolutely necessary part of Erik’s existence. The grass around it was stamped down flat into the mud, as if by feet that left no other sign of their owners’ presences.

"It’s been so long," Erik said to it. "The first time I came here," the only time; he’d had to sneak in, "I thought there had to be some mistake, that this had to belong to someone else of the same name. It couldn’t be you under there, not after…" He coughed. The winter air was sharp in his nose and his throat when he managed to inhale. "Not after everything we’d been through. You always managed to cheat death before. Beat the odds, like that time in Las Vegas…" He laughed, short and humorless. "Or in DC, or Russia, or Cuba. I suppose fate caught up with us."

"You always said we made our own fate," said the figure beside him. "Don’t we still do that?"

"Not with the CIA watching," Erik said, "and you’re an idiot for coming here."

"They’re not watching; I’ve made sure of that," said his companion. "And speaking of idiots, they do know you’re here, and they know why you’re here, but they’re curiously reluctant, shall we say, to do anything. You should be able to get to the Blackbird with no problem, and back to Genosha."

"I don’t suppose you’ve factored surveillance into your lovely equation," Erik said with a sarcasm he didn’t really feel. "As I recall, that was the problem last time. And what would the CIA think, if the man they believed has been dead for a year suddenly waltzed across some CCTV screen?"

"I’m not entirely sure, but I’m sure it would be delightful," Charles Xavier said with a grin Erik thought should be recognizable from space. It lit up the endless cold beneath this breastbone, a cold that had settled in a year ago when Charles nearly _had_ died, and Erik had believed it up until Charles removed his influence from Erik’s mind and said _no no I’m here, I’m alive, by your side always, always._

The subterfuge had been necessary. The CIA found a few bits of flesh containing the DNA of Charles Francis Xavier in the wreckage of the Capitol and declared him dead. Four months later, the US lifted the blockade on Genosha.

 _Let’s go home_ , Charles said, still smiling. His wounded hand slipped into Erik’s unselfconsciously and held on tight.

Erik held on too, and let Charles spirit them out of the cemetery and back home.

* * *

**13\. For wallhaditcoming: Pretense [pretend marriage]**

The biggest problem with pretending to be married to Charles, Erik had found, was how frightfully easy it was to forget he was only supposed to be pretending.

Even now, after his mother had hauled him into the kitchen under the thin cover of needing help finishing dinner, when she had never once admitted to needing help with anything kitchen-related, it was perilously easy to say to himself _Yes, we really are married._

"Erik, he is so delightful!" his mother stage-whispered. Erik tried to make extra noise with a pot lid. "He is so delightful, in fact, I can almost forgive you for eloping." She clicked her tongue. "And honestly, darling, I know you deserve the best, but I think he might almost be too good for you."

Erik had spent over half his life with the paradox of a mother determined to see him married and settled but also firmly believed that no one was worthy of him. This paradox had expressed itself in lamentations over Erik’s succession of obviously inferior boyfriends and girlfriends and quietly critical remarks on a given partner’s shortcomings.

So now that he could stand here, looking out over the kitchen island into the living room, where Charles was regaling his father with the fabricated story of their first meeting, told in such detail Erik could picture it, Erik felt very far away from the happiness on his mother’s face.

* * *

**14\. For ninemoons42: Life and death [silliness, chocolate, vaguely canon]**

"Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt."

"Over my dead body." Erik tightened his grip and took a step back, on guard for any sudden movement. "Charles, don’t do this."

"If you give it to me, I won’t have to." Charles eased his way into the room, moving carefully, slowly. Erik watched him like a hawk. "So for the last time, give me what I want and I won’t maim you."

"I got here first," Erik said, a bit annoyed that he sounded more petulant than threatening. One more step backed him up against the wall.

"I called dibs," Charles said, and lunged.

They landed in a heap on the floor, Erik pinned and twisting between Charles’s thighs. He had much, much longer arms than Charles and used them to hold his prize well out of the reach of Charles’s grasping fingers. For good measure, he leaned up and bit Charles squarely on the right nipple—it was there, Charles bent close as he reached for the Green & Black’s bar—and Charles yowled with indignation.

The chocolate ended up rather mashed and melty, and more of it got on Erik’s hands and Charles’s face than anywhere else.

"Good god, Charles," Erik managed to get out after Charles finished kissing him breathless.

"Some things are worth fighting for," Charles said blithely, looking far too flushed and wicked for a self-avowed pacifist. "And I did call dibs."

"Not having chocolate was never an option," Erik replied and had to grin at Charles’s eloquent eyeroll before leaning up off the cold tile floor to kiss him again.

* * *

**15\. For euphorbic: In the spirit world [fantasy/supernatural[**

Chatoyant blood fell from his knuckles as easily as India ink from Charles’ fingertips.

"Unwise," was all Charles said as he crossed the room in a soft rustle of robes. Taking Erik’s wrist, he kept the warspirit still as he held a bottle underneath his hand to catch the blood.

It needed no help from the crystalline bottle to shine, to stir as if alive. Charles smiled, lips—still vibrantly scarlet, although not prismatic or reflective—suggestive both of pleasure and irritation. Scrollspirits never liked being disturbed at their studies.

"This will make a lovely ink for my rubrics," Charles said, ignoring Erik’s annoyance with the ease of a millennia of practice. "Now, did you come here for a specific purpose, or to bother me?"

"For a purpose," Erik answered.

Charles’s study was much as it had always been, scrolls and scrolls in their shelves, their tags dangling to display the names of long-dead authors, some of their names given to poems and philosophies that, in the human world, had long lost the names of their creators The high mountain wind stirred some of the paper where it escaped the wild air outside and swirls in under the doors, playing with the fine indigo and silver of Charles’s robe, the austere black of Erik’s. A lamp flickered, but the flame inside it didn’t die.

"I need peace for a while," Erik said. The wound across his knuckles had healed, leaving a dull scarlet line, like the dried-blood stitching in his robe. Those close enough to pick out the patterns of the stitches are those close enough for death. "The Chasm took four more of us today."

 _While you write your chronicles_. He would never say that to the scrollspirit; Charles was what he was. He ruled the mind, the pen, the brush; Erik ruled the sword.

"Peace you shall have then." Charles picked up a scroll, neat lines of calligraphy embellished with figures in the margins and red—not so rich as the ink he would make from Erik’s blood—heading the chapter divisions. "I’ll read to you, if you like."

"Tiresome poetry," Erik muttered, but consented to lie down on the divan and let Charles stretch out next to him and begin to read, the silks of their robes overlapping in blue-black-silver-blood.

* * *

**16\. For fengirl88: Internet time always moves faster [social media, humor, meta]**

This is what happens when you go to bed too early.

"Never again," Magneto vows as he logs on to magneto.tumblr.com to find his dash cluttered with Professor Xavier’s latest maunderings on coexistence and human-mutant harmony. The man seems not to sleep at all, or else queues up material specifically designed to aggravate Magneto first thing in the morning.

He sucks down a cup of coffee while he types up scathing replies to profx.tumblr.com and queues up a few polemics of his own to post while he’s busy with other things. Irritation at Professor X runs just under the sweet influence of caffeine, spiking when he notices that Angel has been reblogging the latest pictures of the kittens that apparently live in the stable on Professor X’s property, and Emma had written Professor X a question about New York’s Fashion Week coinciding with the Mutants and the Media conference at NYU.

_You know I’m the most unfashionable person in the world—I’ve been told it’s a secondary (if maladaptive) mutation—but I can’t imagine anyone else I’d rather go with, darling._

"Ha ha." Magneto rolls his eyes. "As if ‘secondary mutation’ isn’t the oldest joke ever."

Angrily, he queues up a few more reblogs before heading over to the fyeahcfx Tumblr. The caffeine, and numerous press photos, quotations, and gifs of Professor Charles Xavier, who smiles joyfully out at him from Magneto’s laptop screen, improve his mood immensely. Of course, he has to edit out some of the more cloyingly sycophantic worship of Xavier’s ideals, but it’s a small effort to exert for such considerable reward.

Magneto reblogs a few photos, adding minimal but crucial commentary. While he believes strongly in the importance of his own opinions, sometimes even his words cannot match the eloquence of Charles Francis Xavier’s eyebrow, or capture the precise tumble of his hair.

Still, he does add a few apropos tags, such as #professor sex me up please and #congratulations on your Gestalt and #i’ll visit you in office hours before he does.

Before he can tear himself away to shower and prepare for a day of pro-mutant advocacy, he checks his Magneto dash one more time.

And discovers, via screencaps and over thirty messages in his inbox, and dear god a meme, that he had not, in fact, signed out of his Magneto account and into his private account (professorsex) at all.

* * *

**17\. For mir-rcha: Specimen number [dystopia, experimentation]**

"Well, now," smiled Charles. "I suppose, it’s time to get ourselves busy with this new specimen. You said, his name is Erik?"

"That’s his I-designation," Stryker corrected huffily. He made a show of consulting his clipboard. "His _specimen number_ is M-Omega-145A."

"Erik," Charles said.

Stryker sighed at the correction but accepted it without further protest. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t good form to refer to the specimens by their I-designations, the names they gave themselves, as if that meant anything to the Knowers. It was a risk, insisting on the I-designation with Knower property, but by the time the specimens got to the Omega Research Facility, they had little enough of themselves left.

This one, though, Erik, met Charles’s eyes squarely, although he had to look through puffy, raised bruises and dried blood to do it. Stryker read off the list of injuries and their causes. Resisting capture, escape. The first five settings on his nullification collar had failed to incapacitate him completely, leading to ten deaths. They had him now in a plastic-armored cell, no metal on his body or the bodies of the Knowers whose task it was to study the most dangerous of the Changed. The only metal in the room was the needle lodged in the specimen’s spine, feeding the antimutagen into him.

Cautiously, one mental eye on Stryker to keep him oblivious and the other on the minds of the other Knowers, Charles reached out. The thoughts greeting him were spiky with distrust, but dominated by a straight-ahead determination to escape, to pull this place down and leave it in ruins. It was a goal Charles firmly supported, but an even an Omega-level mutant had his limits.

 _Calm your mind_ , he said to Erik, who to his credit did not react beyond a glower. _I can get you out of here and away from Genosha to the Free Lands, but you have to trust me._

Trust didn’t come easy to that mind, but come it must, before the permitted twenty-eight days of study passed and the specimen went to its termination. Charles prepared himself to order Stryker off to do paperwork. He had work of his own to do.

* * *

**18\. For professor: The logistics of desire [dubon, coming on faces, dominant!Charles]**

Erik dreamed of Charles coming on his face. He dreamed of tilting his face up, his mouth open and anxious for it, the heavy sound of Charles’s hand working his cock and Charles’s thick breathing. He dreamed of Charles’s hips and thighs working like something finely tuned, roll of muscle and tendon and his spine bending, all of him freezing as he came. He dreamed of hot come striping his hair, his eyelashes, dripping down his nose, the runnel of his philtrum, his gums and tongue and chin and neck so he was filthy with it.

He woke up to his cock an aching tension between his legs, and Charles straddling him and his hands held firmly down, immovable, on the duvet.

"What a delightful image," Charles purred.

Erik surged against his restraints, or tried to; his will ran up against the invisible barrier of Charles’s telepathy. He opened his mouth to tell Charles to get off him and his mouth and tongue moved, shaping the proper syllables, but no sound came out.

 _Get the fuck off_ , he thought instead.

Charles smirked. _Oh, I’ll get off, all right. And you will too, I bet._

He did, in his damn boxers like a teenager, because Charles wouldn’t unlock his muscles so he could get his dick out or be gracious and do it for him. And he did only after Charles bent to lick himself from Erik’s open mouth and smear the rest of it across his face, pressing it into Erik’s skin, filling his nose with the scent of it.

* * *

**19\. For listerinezero: Got a fast car [[Slight return](http://archiveofourown.org/series/10180) verse]**

Erik pulled up in a brand new, candy apple red Camaro.

"You’re… you’re…" _Kidding_ didn’t seem to be strong enough a word for what Charles felt sure Erik was doing at this moment.

Erik slithered out of the driver’s seat, all lanky sinew in jeans and t-shirt, and slammed the door behind him. His smile—smirk, really—was nearly as blinding as the late summer sun off the car’s hood, bright enough to give Charles a headache. Charles imagined his mother reacting to the sight of such a new-fangled, garish monstrosity of an automobile crouching on the drive in the afternoon light, glowing defiantly and marring the cultured, manicured face of the property.

"I don’t kid, Charles." Erik slid one arm around him, a pointed squeeze at Charles’s hip as a reminder. 

"You expect us to drive across the country in that," Charles said flatly. His spine twinged, imagining days and days in what looked like a very uncomfortable passenger seat. "What happened to the Mustang?"

"Sold it," Erik said. "I didn’t know you were so attached."

"I’m not," Charles said quickly. The Mustang had smelled like the interior had marinated in cigarette smoke and very old alcohol, although it did also have pleasant memories that involved him straddling Erik’s lap and Erik biting kisses against his mouth and neck and doing pleasant things to other parts of Charles’s body. "I just…"

"Why not?" Erik asked, and proceeded to unleash a torrent of letters, numbers, and terms that made absolutely no sense to Charles at all. He let the tide of horsepowers and disc brakes and how many cus the engine wash over him, along with Erik’s satisfaction, which was warm like the afternoon.

"And of course some improvements of my own," Erik finished, with a derisive sniff for automobile manufacturers in general.

"Of course," Charles agreed and let Erik pick back up, the thread of his voice turning from the details of the car to driving into New York, you need to meet my mother before we go, to the road and the future.

* * *

**20\. For greencheesecake: Apocalypse [post-apocalyptic/dystopian AU]**

hey _have_ to keep moving, Erik thinks anxiously. But the pallor of Charles’ skin, the way his body trembles against Erik’s, how his step falters more now, the growing stain of red along his makeshift bandage, are becoming impossible to ignore, despite Charles’ insistent murmurs protesting that he’s fine.

"You’re not fine," Erik hisses.

He doesn’t dare speak louder. Charles is too weak to moan or cry out in pain when Erik jerks at him to keep him moving. His feet scuff against the concrete, dragging lines in the ash and dust. Erik casts out behind them, feeling for the huge, lumbering presences of the Sentinels and the guns of the Purifiers who lurk in their shadows.

Maybe a half-mile between them now, although every cell in Erik’s body screams at him to keep moving. Charles, though, Charles can’t.

Digging into the last of his strength— _you need to rest too, Erik_ , Charles’s thready voice says into Erik’s mind—he pulls the two of them into an abandoned building. A red X says the Purifiers have already been here, that the mutants here have either been killed or converted. Erik tries not to look at the overturned furniture or the pictures in their smashed frames, a little girl’s blue face smiling up at him through a muddy bootprint.

"Wait here," he says to Charles after he deposits him on a still-upright sofa. Charles manages to roll his eyes before they slide shut. _Wait_ , Erik adds, wishing he could compel Charles to stay alive. If he had the kind of control Charles had said he could have one day, he’d be able to keep Charles’s blood in his body, where it belongs.

That day isn’t now, so he finds the bathroom and rummages through it for a first-aid kit. Wonder of wonders, he finds a jug of water in the refrigerator—when they first evangelize a new town, the Purifiers don’t bother looting until they’ve neutralized the mutants—and some fruit that hasn’t gone off. He gathers the knives to himself, drawing them out of their wooden block on the counter and honing them all to fine, killing points.

Charles is drowsing, lost in incoherence until Erik peels the sticky bandage off his side. Then he does moan, tensing as the bandage takes some scab and skin along with it. Fresh blood wells up, the iron in it lacing through Erik’s awareness, before Erik can squirt antiseptic into the deep gash just beneath Charles’s ribs and slap a new pressure bandage over it.

"Don’t think it hit anything major," Charles grits out, and when breath fails him, adds telepathically _would be dead by now, otherwise._

"Don’t even think it," Erik growls. He presses harder, despite Charles’s automatic flinch away. "I think it’s slowing down, at least."

"We can’t slow down," Charles says. His eyes slide open, glassy but still with their intent focus, the same focus that had made Erik fall in with a skinny too-short, too-smart kid not long after the world turned upside-down. "If I can’t keep up, Erik, you’ll… you’ll have to leave me. Get to Moira and the sanctuary."

"No way in Hell," Erik growls. He goes cold at the very thought, at leaving Charles here to die—because Charles would, whether by his own hand or the Purifiers’—at running. He’s had Charles by his side for a year now, when they’d found each other cold and scared (and Erik angry), and Charles had said _you’re not alone, we have each other now._

Having that space by his side empty… never an option. Erik chooses to let Charles see for himself, and instead of acknowledging Charles’s stupid, misplaced sense of self-sacrifice with the derision it deserves, settles for pouring water down Charles’s stubborn throat and hand-feeding him apple slices until Charles drifts off to sleep.

* * *

**21\. For sharkweekhomes: Care of Magical Creatures [fantasy AU]**

"I don’t approach anything that has more teeth than I do," the kids parroted dutifully.

Despite the class’s recitation of the basic rules regarding approaching unfamiliar magical creatures, Moira always kept a generous supply of magical bandages, and some of the more level-headed teaching assistants, around. The entire first quarter of Collections class had been devoted to how to be responsible and safe when working with everything from salamanders to Sphinxes, but those lessons tended to go out the window the second they set foot in the Preserve. All the students tended to think of the creatures in the Preserve as being like Charles, who was friendly and almost domesticated, and enjoyed being petted and fed treats.

And of course, _of course_ , there was always one student—Moira would not refer to them as _that idiot student_ —who managed to find, and provoke, the extremely territorial manticore.

"Erik!" Moira hollered now, brandishing her wand at the manticore, who snarled at her before directing his attention—and his three rows of very sharp teeth—to today’s idiot student, Kessery, who was cowering back against a rock, his wand abandoned in the dirt. "Erik, damn it—"

The manticore growled and scratched menacingly at the dirt with his claws. Kessery whimpered. Erik’s dragonish tail lashed back and forth and the lion’s mane framing his face bristled. Moira braced herself to cast a freezing spell, which might—might—withstand the manticore’s native heat long enough for Kessery to get away.

Erik roared. Kessery nearly fainted.

"Erik!" came another voice, followed by a large flame-colored bird flying in from the nearby forest. Through the haze of relief—thank god she wasn’t going to have to spend the day stitching manticore claw scratches—Moira recognized the alerion’s golden flight feathers, their sharp edges smoothed back by flight.

Wonder of wonders, Erik—with a last snarl, of course—stepped away from Kessery. Instead, he redirected his annoyance to the alerion, who effortlessly ignored it and alighted in Erik’s mane and began, over the manticore’s growling, to preen it.

One eye on Erik, Moira darted in to seize Kessery by his robe and drag him to safety. Considering Erik’s territory was quite a ways, it would be a brisk walk and Kessery couldn’t manage much more than being hauled behind a cinnamon tree.

"What did I tell you?" Moira demanded as she checked Kessery for punctures. Aside from a lot of dirt and sweat, he seemed unharmed. Moira added, "You’ll be seeing the dean about detention this afternoon." Kessery nodded wordlessly.

In the clearing, Charles was busy preening Erik’s mane, humming happily while he worked and the manticore rumbled ill-temperedly, probably complaining in manticore-language about Charles interrupting a territorial dispute. Charles only hummed some more. Once he finished, he snuggled into the mane he’d just finished grooming, red and red blending together, and with a put-upon sigh the manticore stalked off into his forest.

* * *

**22\. For keire_ke: Hilarity [post-XMFC, inappropriate laughter]**

In the end they had to wheel Charles back onto the Blackbird, ostensibly for safety, in actuality because five minutes of awkward shuffling around while your leader cries with laughter makes conflict awkward.

"It’s just… oh goodness, you should have _heard_ it!" Charles was actually crying with laughter. "It… when he hit the floor, it… it just… _CLANNNNNG_!" He did a terrible imitation of a metallic ringing noise, or a bell being struck. "It actually made that sound, Hank."

That all of this was still audible, with the Blackbird’s cargo bay doors still being wide open, did not help. The members of the Brotherhood wore thunderous expressions, glaring furiously up at the laughter emanating from the cargo bay. Only Raven, holding Magneto’s helmet while its owner rubbed his head and demanded that Emma just hand over the aspirin she kept in her purse, wasn’t glaring at the plane, although she did look decidedly peeved.

Darwin might be able to adapt to almost everything, up to and including redirected plasma blasts given time, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t adapt his way out of laughing in a situation where one definitely should not laugh.

"Darwin," Alex hissed. He dug an elbow into Darwin’s side. Darwin tittered. "Seriously, what the hell, knock it off."

"I can’t help it," Darwin whispered helplessly. "I know I shouldn’t, but that only… that just makes it worse."

"You’re going to make me start," Alex said. Sure enough, the corner of his mouth flexed, as if fighting to keep something back. "Oh fuck."

That pretty much did it. Darwin nearly bent in two as all the air in his body rushed out in something that could only be described as a guffaw. Alex joined him, going so red with airlessness and hilarity that he looked apoplectic. And of course all of this only made Charles laugh harder, and soon enough Sean joined in.

"Oh come on, Raven, lighten up," Alex wheezed. Magneto started spluttering. "You have to admit, the Master of Magnetism getting brained by his own helmet because his cape got caught in a door is classic."

That was, in essence, what had happened: Magneto had swept into the Secret Government Installation of the day, prepared either to destroy the place or deliver his Mutants Be Free manifesto (or both), and it would have gone very impressively if it hadn’t been for, one, the X-Men "coincidentally" being present, and two, his cape getting caught in the sliding doors.

Thus, when Erik had tried to levitate up to the ceiling for the purposes of menacing, aggressive floating, he’d neatly clotheslined himself on his own cape—and with such force that his helmeted head hit the metal floor with, well, with a _CLANNNNNNNG._

"That is not funny, Charles!" Mystique shouted up at the Blackbird.

Charles’s renewed howls of laughter suggested otherwise. Darwin had thought himself laughed out, but his ribs adapted out of aching, and he found he could start again.

On the other side of the ideological divide, Azazel’s lips twitched.

* * *

**23\. For fourteenacross: Lingering [post-XMFC, references to disability, torture]**

It’s difficult for Erik to see Charles through the lingering fog.

The drops Hank gives him help—or, at least, they seem to. Or it could be time, or the kind of miracle Erik doesn’t believe in anymore.

Knowing that doesn’t keep his heart from surging every time he swears, thinks, hopes the details of the mansion reveal themselves a little more clearly, blurs of light and color resolving into shapes. Sometimes he knows what they are from memory, sometimes he re-learns them when he touches them. Sometimes he asks to borrow Charles’s eyes to verify yes this is a painting, yes this is the tapestry on the wall outside the second drawing-room, yes that’s his face, the swelling around his eyes almost gone now, the marks almost vanished.

Charles’s face remains indistinct to Erik’s own eyes, although his ability—honed, maybe, by his difficulty, and why would it not be? Every attempt at torture has only forged him into something more durable—traces out the metallic ions in Charles’s body, the scaffolding of his wheelchair. He hates the metal; it tastes bitter on his tongue. He wonders if Charles hates it as much as he does, if Charles hates that Erik will recover from what the human experimenters did to him while Charles will never recover from what Erik did to him.

On this Sunday morning he sits in his usual chair in Charles’s study. He can’t read, of course, and there’s nothing to do except simmer in his own helplessness. Charles’s reassurances that they also freed Mystique, Frost, and Riptide feel sincere, but Erik hasn’t heard from them. Maybe, knowing what had happened to him, fearing him compromised, fearing him _disabled_ , they’d unshackled themselves from his dead weight to continue with their mission.

He doesn’t know if it’s pride he feels, or desolation.

"Would you like me to read to you?" Charles asks. He’s at his desk, and thus is a blur of impressions in the late-morning shadows. Erik opens his mouth to refuse, determined to be petulant, when Charles adds, "It’s not as if I can get anything done with your brooding. Unless you’d like to look at my lesson plans?"

Charles isn’t as soft as he used to be. He stings when Erik tries to push against him. It’s another change, and another change Erik isn’t entirely happy about.

"Don’t you think rescuing your _old friend_ from that torture chamber should change your mind?" Erik asks instead. Charles never answers this question; with _Moby-Dick_ in his lap (oh hilarious, Xavier, Erik thinks spitefully), Charles looks set to ignore him yet again. Regardless, Erik asks, "What is the magnitude of loss you’d be willing to endure, Charles, before you realize the humans want us dead or enslaved? Or do you want us all dead but morally pure as you?"

"If you think those who imprisoned you—who tortured you…" Charles breathes raggedly, his hand moving closer, resolving into fingers that stroke carefully at the corners of Erik’s half-seeing eyes. "If you think they went free or… or without repercussions, you would think wrong. But if you think that means I’m ready to declare war on humans, you’d be wrong again."

Erik exhales sharply. It’s the most he’s ever gotten out of Charles on the subject. He can’t see Charles’s face clearly, of course, but he knows the expression he’d see there: set and stubborn, not about to give another inch no matter the lever Erik uses. 

"Read your damn book, then," he growls.

Charles opens the novel to "The Doubloon" and begins to read, and the page floats up before Erik’s eyes, the words flickering and resolving and Charles’s attention does, carrying him away from the half-seen world.

* * *

**24\. For icecreamwolf: Wants and needs [Old Married Dudes]**

There is nothing Erik wants more, than what he thinks he’ll never have. His life and some desires are mutually exclusive, and it’s safe to want things with no chance of having them and no chance of them pulling him from his mission.

So it’s strange to look up from his papers—painful writing, surely they’re past butchering Shakespeare by now—to watch Charles frowning at his laptop and poking irritably at the trackpad. Checking the news, Erik recognizes the expression, the particular slant to Charles’s mouth that says irritation.

It’s strange to look up at that and realize he’s seen variations on that expression for over forty years, since the morning after a night in the water. He’s seen Charles overjoyed and exhilarated, enraged, terrified, quiet, sleeping, passionate, in pain, relieved, simply, purely, happy, and something Erik can’t name—what he sees right now when Charles becomes aware of him looking and warmth brushes across Erik’s mind before Charles catches his gaze, his eyes still vibrantly blue after all these years.

Sometimes he’s terrified he’ll wake up and this will vanish. The humans and their idiot prejudices he can handle; they aren’t a source of terror for him. But the school and Charles disappearing into a dream or into some terrible lie… sometime the fear grips him right under his heart and Charles, wordlessly, shifts closer to him. They never talk about it; Charles knows, of course, there isn’t much to say they haven’t said and that sometimes there aren’t words to say at all.

There is nothing Erik wants more than what he thinks he’ll never have, except what he has already.

 _You’ll always have it_ , Charles says, with conviction enough for both of them. Out loud, he says, "Have you finished reading the indignities your students have visited on _MacBeth_?"

"Unfortunately no," Erik grumbles. "If I become murderous before the end of it, no jury would hold me accountable for what I might do."

"Of course darling," Charles says indulgently, and closes his laptop and wheels over to sit next to Erik while Erik reads some of the choicest passages to him.


	21. Morning after

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Remember that smart remark about growing up in such hardship?" Charles had asked as Erik watched the descent of caterers and furniture movers and _strangers_ with horror and annoyance. "Welcome to it, my love."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: A/O, canon divergence (post-beach, no divorce). Sort of a self-comforting thing, because today is not easy.
> 
> For **asix_oud** 's lovely art, [The morning after](http://asix-oud.tumblr.com/post/43677618724/the-morning-after), and a follow-up to [Family portrait](http://archiveofourown.org/works/674013/chapters/1288360).

The one-moon ceremony the day before had dragged obnoxiously on, right up to the edge of Erik's endurance. Never mind that they were nominally in hiding after Cuba, at least a hundred people had showed up to dote and coo over Lorna's curls and dimples. Apparently Rabbi Cohen had mentioned the Xavier-Lehnsherr baby to one of the ladies in his congregation, from which point the knowledge had spread like wildfire.

"You _are_ having a proper one-moon celebration," one of the society omegas had asked, coming upon them while they'd been out baby shopping one day. It had been one of those questions that really was not a question. "Of _course_ you have to have one, it's _tradition_ ," and the next thing Erik knew, Charles had agreed and then Raven--and, unexpectedly, the boys--had gotten in on it.

"Remember that smart remark about growing up in such hardship?" Charles had asked as Erik watched the descent of caterers and furniture movers and _strangers_ with horror and annoyance. "Welcome to it, my love."

Charles had probably had a proper one-moon ceremony, surrounded by mountains of presents and speculation about how he'd be married off, Erik had speculated, with adults baby-talking over their tea sandwiches and getting drunk to deal with the tedium. That Charles had hinted at things that made his blood boil--an infancy and childhood with his flesh-parent absent, given to a parade of nannies and nurses to raise--had somehow not eased his irritation with the entire production.

Why anyone had thought it would be a good idea to subject a month-old baby to even an hour of forced social interaction, Erik had no idea. Lorna had peered hazily around at all the strangers, cried at some and burbled at others, apparently at random, before deciding she hated everyone. Charles had been an icon of glowing, doting omega pride, and then of omega smugness when Lorna's shrieking meant he got to escape and put her down for a nap. That had left Erik and Raven to collect well-wishes and presents, which meant Raven laughing at Erik "trying to act civilized and polite," and later on morphing into Erik and reenacting his surliness for Charles's amusement.

That Lorna, overstimulated and thrown off her schedule by the ceremony and party, had spent the rest of the night wailing in her crib had not been as much of a consolation as Erik would have liked. Infants stayed close to the parents, which meant Erik got to listen to Lorna's increasingly frustrated cries and Charles's increasingly frustrated attempts to nurse, change, play with, or otherwise soothe her.

"Not enough coffee in the world," Charles moaned once Erik shuffled into the kitchen the next morning. "Honestly, it's like she _knew_ just when I was about to drop off."

Charles already had the moka pot on the table, steam drifting lazily from its spout, although he hadn't progressed to pouring himself a cup. Instead, he slumped at the table, all exhaustion-loose limbs and tousled hair, his neck a temptingly vulnerable curve. If Erik hadn't been so staggeringly tired himself, he might have done something about it. Charles made a weak noise that might have been laughter.

"Maybe she's telepathic," Erik said. He poured some espresso into Charles's cup and then his own. Charles shook a worryingly large amount of sugar into his and downed the demitasse in one go, then faceplanted into the table again.

"I hope not," he mumbled. After a pause, he added, "Of course, we've no data on how, or if, the gene responsible for metahuman abilities is inherited... She could be metallokinetic. Or, god help us, a telepathic metallokinetic."

"I suppose we'll know if she starts flinging sharp metal objects about," Erik said dryly. He busied himself with the cornflakes and, after finding one, a ripe banana from the sideboard. Charles had finally started eating the things again; the smell had sent him running, despite his irritable declarations that food aversions made no sense, and bananas were healthy and had potassium, and why he couldn't look at them without going green, he had no idea. "At least she's asl--"

" _Don't_ say it," Charles hissed. "You'll hex it."

No sound came from the bedroom, and Charles remained half-comatose in his chair, which Erik took to mean Lorna hadn't woken up. He set the cereal and milk in front of Charles, who turned his head awkwardly so he could peer at it, as if at some exotic dish. 

Erik sat down next to him, hand automatically going to Charles's knee, strong under the soft covering of his pajama pants. Charles's hand slid over his, fingers twining sleepily together. Charles had his head tilted enough so Erik could see the edges of his smile, softly warm and sleepy, filled with a contentment that drew Erik down to calmness.

Of course, Lorna chose that moment to emit a piercing shriek, clearly audible even down the long hall between the master suite and the kitchen. Charles winced; apparently Lorna's mental cry was not much quieter.

"She needs changing, my love," Charles said as he picked up his spoon.

"Of course she does." Erik said this with great sarcasm, but untangled their fingers with a last kiss to Charles's knuckles and stood, steeling himself for another battle over diapers.


	22. Love and war

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of course, Charles, fourteenth of the dynasty but first of that name, was already in the kingdom and, facing his _ally_ in his private study, was also not above violence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: C/E (as always), political/fantasy AU. A little bit has been added in the way of expansion.
> 
> Another piece for **palalife** , this time for [this fantastic little graphic mini-story](http://palalife.tumblr.com/post/45540042284/palalife-evil-professor-posted-this-and-as). Idea pirated from **professor** , who also wrote a snippet that you should check out. The link to it is at the bottom of pala's reblog! <3

Any child in West who knew her history—so, every child above four; West started historical education very young—knew why West had never made alliance with Genosha. Back in the days of Xavier I, the First King of West and the King of Genosha had been friends, but then the King of Genosha had persuaded the First King into war. The First King had died and his widow, in rage and grief, had vowed two things: first, that West would never enter another war again; and second, that it would never enter into an alliance of any sort with a nation of traitors. Thus Genosha and West would exist in enmity for all time.

West had existed for nearly a thousand years in uninterrupted peace, and the capital at Cestre, sheltered in its mountain strongholds, had never seen a siege or sent soldiers out to defend the borderlands. It kept a standing army but, as Guard-Commander Howlett said, it was good mostly for standing and not much else. First and foremost West relied on its diplomacy, and its reputation for alchemical and scientific research that would bring down an army of demons on anyone who dared bring violence into the kingdom.

Of course, Charles, fourteenth of the dynasty but first of that name, was already in the kingdom and, facing his _ally_ in his private study, was also not above violence.

"We aren’t completely defenseless," Charles snapped. Underneath the thick mantle of his cape, Erik’s shoulders shook. Charles scowled. "Of course, it would have been nice if you had made your entrance on time, King of Genosha."

"That Lieutenant MacTaggart is far too zealous." Charles was gratified to see that a small tear ran through Erik’s fine maroon coat, exposing the light leather armor underneath. "And your people remember their history too well."

"Our history is what’s kept us at peace," Charles said. He remained standing, while Erik, Magneto, King of Genosha, lounged in one of the chairs by the fire. Generations of the Kings and Queens of West, surrounded by generations of their books, looked down on them. Charles felt very small, and very censured. "I hope you realize what it took to keep this from Howlett, Ororo, and the others, and that it means they think I am insane for even entertaining your proposal."

"I wonder what they’d think if they knew you’d already accepted it." Erik’s grey eyes, lazily narrowed but keen as ever, fixed on Charles. "Or if they knew you were the one who proposed it _before_ the audience today."

"And I wonder what your advisors would say if they knew you’d spent your lieutenancy sneaking away from your border patrol to meet with a pacifist out studying botany."

It was Erik’s turn to scowl. Charles laughed and, after a long moment, Erik’s thin mouth melted into something resembling a smile.

"The war with Stryker is coming," Erik said, all teasing gone. Charles nodded and felt, suddenly, as if the solidity of Cestre’s walls around him had become ephemeral. "Your people must see that the only way to head it off is to strike first, before his army is fully assembled. It’s time for our war to end, first, before we begin a new one."

Charles sighed. "I know."

A warm, gloved hand slid through his. Under the glove, Charles knew, would be calluses, from years of sword-work and horseback riding, all of Erik stripped down to the essentials: bone, tendon, slim, hard muscle. Genoshans trained their children in war nearly from the cradle; sometimes, Charles thought, Erik had drunk it in with his mother’s milk.

The way Erik looked at him right now, though, was not particularly warlike, something soft underneath all the dangerous edges.

"In Genosha, we offer a sword as our betrothal gift," Erik said. He touched the hilt of the sword at his hip. "Would—would you accept mine?"

"Gladly," Charles said, "although in West, we offer books," and laughed as Erik pulled him down into a kiss.

For the fourteen years that had passed since they'd known each other, Charles could count the handful of times they had managed to kiss. Those times numbered even fewer than the times they had met, moments stolen on the few occasions Erik's battalion had toured close to the border between Genosha and West and Charles had been able to contrive an excuse to survey the land on his side of the boundary. Raven had probably come to suspect Charles's sudden interest in the flora and fauna of the northeastern realm, but she'd kept quiet.

And yet, for that bare handful of times, Erik's mouth was familiar to his own, angular hardness yielding to gentleness under Charles's lips and tongue. Charles sighed against him, careful to keep quiet – Logan and Moira were lurking just on the other side of the door – and felt that mouth curl in a smile before Erik drew back.

"I hope that book isn't about any nonsense like the virtues of peace," Erik said. The words were only half-teasing; the other half reminded Charles Erik had been a warrior from the cradle. It wasn't for nothing the world called the Genoshan royalty the soldier-princes, when Erik's court finery had worn in at the corners and the sword at his hip was functional, not ceremonial. This was – and he had pressed this point over Ororo's objections – the one man Stryker might actually fear enough to reconsider his invasion.

"A book of natural philosophy, I'm afraid," Charles said, instead of the thousand, difficult things sitting heavy on his tongue. "It has my notes in it."

"I'm anxious to read how you thought you could improve that scholar's argument, then," Erik said. His grey eyes narrowed at the corners, the fine lines around them growing deeper as he smiled briefly before looking down to Charles's hand, resting on the arm of his chair.

His good humor slid away as fast as it had come. Erik was mercurial like that, to Charles's delight and dismay. Erik's fingers closed firmly around Charles's wrist, as if Erik were testing the strength of it.

"You and your people are stronger than you know," Erik said. He said the words quietly, but with force behind them. "There's no reason for you to hide in the upcountry, waiting for Stryker to pounce."

"I'm starting to see that," Charles breathed, not daring to speak more loudly. It was close to heresy, worse that the King of West was saying this. "But Erik… I want a preemptive defensive war _only_. I've no interest in conquest."

"War doesn't care what your interests are," Erik told him. He tugged Charles close again, his breath hot on his cheek, his fingers in Charles's hair. "War chooses the path when it comes to you, and you have no choice but to go where it wishes. Stryker's death is your safety, that's where this must go… and I will see you safely there."


	23. Anurophilia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven's pretty sure Science is just trolling Hank now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: um, C/E sort of, they are frogs.
> 
> Thanks to groovyphilia and her tags for cheering me up on a horrible morning. Inspired by her tags and [this gifset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/45991860320/theletteraesc-enough-with-canada-the-last).

"I know this is for Science and all," Raven said, "but seriously, I think Science is just trolling you at this point."

"Raven, just…" The picture on the screen of Raven's iPhone wobbled and blurred before resettling on a face that was decidedly not Hank's earnest, bespectacled human one. This one was rather greener and bumpier and with a wide mouth. Hank's voice said, "Okay, can you see Charles?"

"Yes, Hank." Raven reminded herself that Hank had agreed to take her out to dinner at a restaurant of her choice and the new cop-detective-action movie out tonight. Raven loved cop-detective-action movies for the same reasons Hank hated them: explosions, improbable martial-arts moves, and even more improbable plots. "Okay, I'm going to, I don't know…" She set the camera down on her desk and fiddled with the angle. "Can you see the frog?"

Hank sighed. "His name is Erik, Raven."

"Fine. Erik. Whatever. _Can you see him_?"

"Ribbit," said Charles the frog.

Raven fully expected Erik the frog to ignore the video-frog right in front of his face, and never mind that Hank had assured her that "Erik" and "Charles" were tank-mates and quite good friends, and moreover had actual personalities. Hank had several stories about Erik attacking the undergrad lab assistants stupid enough to stick their hands in his tank, and Charles sharing flies with Erik when Erik had first arrived. Given they looked exactly the same as every other amphibian in Hank's collection, Raven had a hard time believing this.

So it was with some astonishment that she watched as Erik the frog inclined his head thoughtfully and stared with his buggy frog-eyes at the frog on the other side.

"Gribbit," Erik croaked. His tongue shot out and stuck to the iPhone screen, more or less right on top of Charles's snout.

"Oh my god!" said Hank. The picture flailed and Charles vanished for a moment before Hank remembered to steady the phone. "Oh my god, Raven do you realize what this means?"

"Yes, it means I have frog spit on my screen." Raven wondered if Lysol was safe for iPhones.

Meanwhile, Erik and Charles were rocking back and forth, exchanging croaks and ribbits and horrible tonguey frog kisses that, Raven supposed, would have been adorable if it hadn't meant a frog was trying to make out with her cell phone. Erik bumped his face against the screen and made a frustrated noise, one that Charles echoed, lifting up a front foot to place it stickily against the screen of Hank's phone.

"Look, I'm sure whatever you wanted to learn, you learned by now," Raven said. God, there were _smears_. Her phone was probably never going to feel clean again. "Can I go disinfect my phone before I catch some horrible frog disease?"

"You won't catch any horrible frog disease, but sure," Hank said. "I'll put Charles back in his tank."

"Fantastic." Raven moved to press the disconnect button with her thumb.

Erik latched on to her thumb before it got there.

The next time Raven heard Hank's voice it was small and distant, and coming from the floor halfway across the room. The time after that, Hank's voice came to her from much closer, and above her, from his concerned face. He had Charles cupped in his hands. Erik, Raven thought dully, was gnawing viciously at her thumb.

"I guess they weren't done talking," Hank said. He deposited Charles in his tank and, fortunately for him, detached Erik from Raven's thumb. From the amount of croaking going on, Raven imagined Erik was telling Charles all about how he defeated the stupid human who had tried to interrupt their conversation.

They were going to watch that cop-detective-action drama movie twice, Raven vowed, after she finished telling Hank he had better wash his hands before touching her again or else he wouldn't live to regret it. Twice. Back-to-back.


	24. Temptation and fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik watches numbly, not bothering to agree, as Charles strips off his tunic and toes off his sandals and thinks of the idols humans make from gold and marble and the poetry they write.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: pre-C/E, AU, and they are angels this time. Um, vague age difference? They're thousands of years old, but Charles is understood to be somewhat younger than Erik.
> 
> As a side note, even though they're angels, the mythology/religion they belong to is only nominally Christian.
> 
> For comew's totally lovely art [right here ♥](http://comew.tumblr.com/post/45840799661/i-really-need-to-take-a-rest)

Charles has memories of the Falling, as all the younger angels do, the memory bred into him along with the Commandments written in his celestial flesh. As many young ones do—as Michael and Gabriel insist they do—he thinks of the Host as the One, a single will wound like a golden thread between a hundred thousand bodies, and each one of those bodies made of the same ineffable substance. He doesn't see the fractures that Erik sees, the wound first opened by Lucifer that, in the timeless years since the Falling, have only widened and deepened down to the bone.

Erik had not rebelled with Lucifer and his followers. When Sebastian had destroyed his own crèche-mates, Erik's nurse among them, he had picked up his sword and struck down his brother without much thought. Yet, alongside that newly-frayed gold thread that is an angel's purpose, something darker grew. Erik, in the new place called privacy, the place of a separate and hidden mind, thinks that God's firstborn are the superior creation and mankind their imperfect younger siblings. He would never rebel and forsake his own nature, not like his misguided older brother, but the belief remains.

In the wake of the Falling, the Creator gave them new brothers and sisters to replace the dead or banished, and the new ones like Charles find themselves trapped between a nature that says do not change and, once they are out of the crèche, older teachers who say, in the limited vocabulary of angels for such things, that change they must.

"I keep records," Charles says now. He favors Erik with as close to a rebellious look as Charles ever comes. Erik wonders, heretically, how Charles manages not to see his own, separate being, the one that bridles at going out into the field and training for the Second War. "Honestly, Erik, what good a bookkeeper is going to do you on the front lines, I have no idea."

"Just put up your sword," Erik snaps.

"Yes sir," Charles says with something that could be called sarcasm. Still, he runs a finger down the edge, the metal heating with celestial fire and cooling to renewed sharpness. He racks the sword with the others, all long, coldly silver blades forged from the rocks that tumbled through the vast chasm between the Upper Heavens and the Earth. Erik's own sword never leaves his side, a weight he's learned to fly with by counterbalancing it with spear and knife.

He reminds Charles of the next day's training, a trip Earthward. Charles lights up, incandescent, not precisely the reaction Erik had wanted, but one he finds himself watching helplessly, Charles's bright, heaven-blue eyes and quick smile, the sudden animation of him.

"We're forbidden from interacting with them," Erik says over Charles's speculations on what they could be doing Earthside, "so no, you won't be able to talk to them, or any of your foolishness." So far as he's concerned, this is a good thing.

"Still!" Charles says enthusiastically. The newly-fledged wings on his back, which out of the script and sigils marked into pale skin, tremble with excitement. They have hints of red gold and bronze in them, to match the sun-streaks in his brown hair. "If I'm to keep records of their lives and deeds, I should know something about them."

"Not too much," Erik cautions. He follows Charles back into the adamantine walls of the hold. The movement of Charles's spine, clear underneath the thin tunic—he had taken off his armor in the barracks—distracts him from his worry and impatience.

They are all made in their Creator's image and gifted with some portion of eir power. Yet Charles leaps out from the endless sameness of his siblings. Erik believes that shade of blue belongs only to Charles; he's never seen it duplicated in the eyes of any other angel. The same for his hair, curly and windblown, and his skin, which is coppered with freckles in patterns unique to him. Erik's wings, slaty grey and black-streaked like an osprey's, tremble behind him, the way they do when his thoughts verge on the blasphemous.

"Sleepy," Charles announces as he heads into the great sleeping-room the angels of the hold share. "I suppose, if we're going Earthside tomorrow, I should rest."

Erik watches numbly, not bothering to agree, as Charles strips off his tunic and toes off his sandals and thinks of the idols humans make from gold and marble and the poetry they write. He knows of physical attraction and intercourse, the necessity of it and how men and women come together in a representation of the unified Creator. But the knowledge is an angel's coldly intellectual knowledge—at least, until now, without the heat of the body and attraction behind it.

He keeps that walled off in the secret place, the space in his head formed by the divisions created in the Falling, the space he calls, unangelically, _my own_. He wants Charles as his own, unmarked, celestial skin and muscle blushing crimson underneath him, Charles singing his name for a hymn as Erik fills his sight and blots out the rest of Heaven. All of this he wants has he has wanted nothing since the end of the rebellion, and he and his brothers and sisters felt, for the first time, the perils of loneliness.

Right now, Erik feels terribly alone. Better that, he decides, than that Charles should know the sorts of thoughts he has. He's too young, Erik tells his yearning body. This is another thing: angels are perfect fusions of will and flesh, the body obedient to the angel's desires. So it is new, to feel his body ache and want as a thing separate from himself, or to feel as if Charles has tied a knot in Erik's chest and leads him helplessly along.

Temptation, of course, caused the Falling of both angels and men. Erik can see over the edge and sees how easy it would be to step over it, to step behind Charles and pull Charles back against his body and whisper blasphemous thoughts as he embraces Charles with his arms and his wings, like a raptor mantling its prey.

Instead he watches as Charles settles into his bunk, infant wings fluttering contentedly before relaxing as Charles sighs. When Erik does take a step, it is to pull the cloud-thin, feather-warm coverlet up over his shoulders and, without touching, look his fill before he leaves.


	25. Elementary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Xavier, of course, means his low-riding leather pants, the bare, pale skin of his chest, to shock. Erik imagines the handcuffs he's sensed on one of Xavier's many bookshelves and the collection of plugs and rings in a side table drawer are meant for the same purpose. If Erik had been a sobriety counselor from the local Catholic hospital, he might have clutched his pearls and swooned, but he's not. Brian Xavier hadn't needed telepathy to understand his son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: pre-C/E, Elementary fusion! Thanks to Ces for suggesting it <3 There is a content warning for referenced alcoholism/alcohol abuse.
> 
> Inspired by [this really inspirational gifset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/47740420817/codenamecesare-theletteraesc-could-you-get).

"And you do this for a living," Xavier says flatly. He punctuates the statement—it isn't a question—with a deep swallow of milk.

The only sound in the flat is Xavier draining the bottle, then the refrigerator door slamming shut. Xavier levels Erik with an expression of utter disdain before vanishing into the living room.

Xavier, of course, means his low-riding leather pants, the bare, pale skin of his chest, to shock. Erik imagines the handcuffs he's sensed on one of Xavier's many bookshelves and the collection of plugs and rings in a side table drawer are meant for the same purpose. If Erik had been a sobriety counselor from the local Catholic hospital, he might have clutched his pearls and swooned, but he's not. Brian Xavier hadn't needed telepathy to understand his son.

"As a condition of living here rent-free," Erik begins, only to be interrupted by a silent _Yes, at the most run-down property my father owns in New York City_ , "you're to comply with all of my instructions, submit to regular breath tests and any blood tests as deemed necessary, and attend regular counseling sessions either in group or in private."

"That's fascinating," Xavier says. "Tell me, was it _really_ because your mother died of overdosing on pain medication after that hit-and-run that you became a sobriety counselor, or is that just what you tell yourself?"

Erik goes very still; it's either that or lash out with the nearest metal he can find. Xavier's gloating, his smugness filling the air between them, and Erik would like so very much to do to him what he would have done to the anonymous person who slowly killed his mother, the ever-present rage clawing for a way out, reaching for the plumbing and the wires in the ceiling and bracing itself to _yank_ —

"Did you nearly die of alcohol poisoning because your control over your telepathy was that bad, or is that just what you tell yourself?" he asks.

Xavier goes satisfyingly pale and silent, his red lips compressed in fury. Erik takes the moment to breathe the anger out and center himself, and prepare himself for whatever other missiles Xavier wants to fling at him.

What Xavier does, though, is turn away and start hunting for a shirt. He digs one up from behind an easy chair and, after sniffing it and finding it acceptable, pulls it on. "Come on," he says as he pulls a jacket from its resting place on the couch, "time's wasting, and we must be going."

"Going where?" Erik snaps. He shoves his intake and preliminary interview forms into his laptop case. "In case you weren't aware, your father hired me to be your live-in sober companion, not a slave to cater to your excessively juvenile whims."

"This isn't a whim, Mr. Lehnsherr," Xavier says with far too much cheer. He taps his forehead. "It's murder, and we're—well, I am—very much needed."


	26. Run away with me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The world," Charles says. "The hearts of forests, the deeps of the oceans, the hidden parts of cities, the invisible roads. _Adventure_ , Erik." Raven's always called him too _permanent_ ; his habit of settling in like a bird to roost at any promising home is of long-standing. His blood stirs in him again, calling him away; he won't have long, less time if Erik rejects him. "My love, I would have you by my side."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: A sort of combined C/E Regency-supernatural AU, in which Charles is a sort of fey/supernatural creature that wanders between various worlds and times.
> 
> Inspiration comes from [this gifset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/47726011945/run-away-with-me-so-there-is-another) as well as another one that I unfortunately can't find.

"I have my own inheritance," Charles says, aware it sounds too much as if he's begging to sell himself and his secrets to this strange man. "Don't chase after the Marquis anymore. Come with me. You _must_ see that—"

"What must I see?" asks Lehnsherr quietly.

"That your pursuit of vengeance against Schmidt will offer you nothing," Charles says. "He will be bankrupt or dead, or both, and your life will mean nothing."

"I'd always said you think you know far too much for being so young," Lehnsherr says. The tone is bitter although his expression is somber. "And what could you—an obscure, penniless wanderer with no status, no name in society—offer me to tempt me away from my chosen course?"

"The world," Charles says. "The hearts of forests, the deeps of the oceans, the hidden parts of cities, the invisible roads. _Adventure_ , Erik." Raven's always called him too _permanent_ ; his habit of settling in like a bird to roost at any promising home is of long-standing. His blood stirs in him again, calling him away; he won't have long, less time if Erik rejects him. "My love, I would have you by my side."

"And I would have you by mine," Lehnsherr says. He steps close, close enough for his breath to brush warm against Charles's hair. "Why can not you stay with me? I'll marry some heiress and leave her to her own devices, and build you a house and keep you there like a rare jewel."

"My kind isn't for keeping." Ever since he had stumbled across Lehnsherr he has been intrigued enough to be kept. "This world, Erik," he can't believe he dares to use Lehnsherr's true name; if he says it twice more, a proper summoning, perhaps Erik will come with him, "your houses, jewels, wealth… it's all illusion. You place your security in things, in money and weapons to defend yourself. What I can give you is the world, Erik. The world itself, as it truly is. Everything Schmidt has taken from you, you can have again."

"You speak like the devil, to tempt me." Lehnsherr says. He tugs his coat absentmindedly, although it, like the rest of him, is disheveled. He looks like he might look after a night spent in the windy corridors between places. Charles loves it, loves it too much to be safe.

He wishes Erik could hear his mindspeech, but that pure language only exists among the Untamed and the Fenceless, the ones who wander between languages and peoples. If Erik did understand it, he would see that what Charles offers him is beyond the price of anything.

There is a reason, Charles realizes, why the Fenceless do not fall in love. And, too, he realizes too late that the day he stumbled upon Lehnsherr, that day when he'd been traveling the Wilderness beyond Ironfell's neat fences and Erik had seen him, and ridden up to him and hailed him, he had been lost. Like a bird tamed to the wrist, he fears he'll come whenever Erik calls now.

"Please," he says, begs, prays. "Run away with me."

"I—" Lehnsherr says.


	27. Life of Ω (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We are not doing — doing _this_ ," Charles was not going to say mating under any circumstances, "in the middle of the ocean. Honestly."
> 
> "Well," Erik said, "it would pass the time."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: In the same 'verse as [Life of Ω](), which is pre-C/E, A/O AU, no powers. 90% humor/silliness. Many thanks to Astasia for the piece of art that started this off <3
> 
> Inspired by, and a continuation of [this lovely art](http://garnetquyen.tumblr.com/post/46629637451/since-im-shitty-at-writing-allow-me-to-continue) by garnetquyen!

"Get _off_ me!" Charles braced his hands against Erik's chest—his broad, nicely muscled chest, which the moonlight and salt water gilded attractively—and shoved with the last of his strength and the last of his coherence.

He suspected that, rather than being overwhelmed by Charles's superior strength, Erik had allowed Charles to push him away. Charles looked around desperately for the oar, in case he needed it; Erik seemed to respect that, if nothing else.

"Charles," Erik said, his voice gratifyingly fragmented, his eyes glassy. Charles did not look any lower than the broad line of Erik's shoulders. "I—"

"We are not doing — doing _this_ ," Charles was not going to say mating under any circumstances, "in the middle of the ocean. Honestly."

"Well," Erik said, "it would pass the time."

"And we would both die of dehydration," Charles said. Then he added, more because he wanted to hear it than that he actually believed it, "Besides, I don't want to be your mate. Not even if we were on dry land." Even if they were in a comfortable bed with the doors locked. Definitely not even then. He ignored Erik's crestfallen expression and soft _just-rejected-alpha_ whine.

"Now," he said, drawing the last, pitifully shredded remnants of his dignity around him and trying not to think about Erik kissing him, how Erik's body had been hot under the cool overlay of seawater, "I am going sit on this end of the boat, and you will sit on that end, and we will try to restrain ourselves. Understood?"

"Understood," Erik said and, far more cooperatively than he had done anything in the past two weeks of their acquaintance, curled up in the bow of the lifeboat.

Charles watched him carefully, to make sure Erik stayed where he was and didn't try anything, like getting up to curl around Charles to keep him warm or surround him with his scent or, god forbid, mouth teasingly at Charles's neck. _Where_ , Charles thought despairingly as he held on to his oar and contemplated the depressing inevitability of having to sleep some time, _is a good deserted island when you need one?_

* * *

Anyone with a working knowledge of biology—no, forget that, Charles thinks irritably, two functioning brain cells—knows that omegas don't just roll over for any alpha that bumbles along. It's terrible evolutionary policy to begin with (Charles imagines Darwin rolling over in his grave); why would you leave the success of the future generation to chance? For that matter, why would you want to conceive a child with an untrustworthy dimwit who can't even take care of emselves? Charles fumes and adds a bit more to the already-extensive rant he composes in his head whenever he sees completely wrong-headed messages about omegas promulgated in everything from religion to pop culture.

"You know," he says to the alpha, who's curled up on his end of the boat, "just because you are, quite literally, the only alpha in a thousand miles doesn't mean I want to mate with you. Biology doesn't work like that."

Erik grumbles disrespectfully, but then offers a grudging nod; Charles can see the dark shape of his head as it dips. The boat bobs quietly, its adventure with the breaching whale forgotten. After a moment, Erik focuses on him; his attention has a texture to it, exciting even though Charles knows how terrible an idea being interested in Erik would be. "You don't strike me as that kind of omega anyway," Erik says.

"No kind of omega is like that," Charles snaps, tightening his grip on his oar. "Studies have shown that, even when not on suppressants, omegas are still less promiscuous while in hormonally-heightened states than alphas. The only omegas that are that kind of omega are the ones who honestly don't care what sluts you think they are, and they probably wouldn't sleep with you anyway."

The jab isn't quite as sharp as he'd hoped. The expression on Erik's face suggests he's had plenty of omegas to keep him occupied. It's further evidence that Erik isn't mate material, definitely not spouse material. Science may be a demanding mistress, but at least she's never tried to knock him up and leave him to raise a kid on his own. At least, Charles thinks as he considers some of Hank's wilder theories, not yet.

"You know," Charles says when Erik seems inclined to remain silent; it's like poking at something large, sharp-toothed and drowsing: dangerous, but he can't help but do it, "even if I were interested in you—which I'm not—what in god's name makes you think mating here, now, in the middle of the ocean would be a good idea? I thought omegas in heat were supposed to be the irrational, sex-crazed ones."

He's just about to list off all the reasons why mating here, now, would be a colossally bad idea, from being distracted and missing a passing ship to the impossibility of meeting Charles's dietary requirements if he got pregnant to how Charles absolutely refused to raise a child on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, when Erik says, more of a sigh than anything, "I'd like to get some sleep, Charles."

Charles blinks. "Okay then."

Erik curls up tightly, his back—his broad back, pale in the moonlight—to Charles. He tugs his blanket up over his shoulders to keep away the chill of the night air, and up higher, tugging it down tight. It's to block his nose, Charles realizes with a start, to remove temptation. It's both a relief and a disappointment.

He reminds himself he doesn't have the luxury to turn his back on Erik, not with his heat creeping up on him inexorably and with the makeshift raft now scattered across the face of the Pacific. Charles pulls his own blanket close around him, tucks it around his neck where the scent gathers and hangs heavy, tightens his grip on his oar and waits until he has to fall asleep.


	28. To taking over the world

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Shall we order before we begin negotiations?" Emma asks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: Emma/Moira, set in the [Mad Mutants](http://archiveofourown.org/works/482151/chapters/838839) AU.
> 
> Originally written as a snippet response for Prof <3

"Dr. MacTaggert, I presume?" Emma says as smoothly as she can. Infuriatingly, it’s somewhat less smooth than she would like. Still, she slides like silk into the booth across from Moira MacTaggert, setting her Gucci bag next to the other woman’s practical-looking satchel. A water materializes with a fresh drink for her and coffee for Dr. MacTaggert. Emma smiles. “Irish coffee?"

 

Those thin, demurely-rouged lips turn upward. “Best of both worlds."

Emma doesn’t miss that Dr. MacTaggert misses nothing; she’d expect no different from a scientist, even if she had expected a scientist to appear in something other than the tall leather boots and gunmetal-gray skirt and floral blouse. The bow lacing the neck shut trails between two small, pert breasts; Emma wishes for rather more decolletage, but really, she can’t complain. Serious eyes skim over Emma in turn, cataloging her Chanel, her Tiffany—and, Emma realizes as she slides into Dr. MacTaggert’s mind like a scalpel—her face, idle speculations on what sorts of things a mouth like Emma’s might know how to do.

"Shall we order before we begin negotiations?" Emma asks. Dr. MacTaggert’s smooth contralto replies, an affirmative and an observation that it would be good to get the niceties out of the way; “I’m here for business, Ms. Frost," Dr. MacTaggert says. To the waiter, who’s just appeared, she says, “Chicken salad, Irish coffee—hold the coffee."

Emma gives her own order, not looking away from Dr. MacTaggert as she hands her menu to the waiter. “Leave the bottle," she says, relishing the upcurve of Dr. MacTaggert’s mouth. “And since I’m sure we’ll be on…. very close terms after today, Dr. MacTaggert," you can call me Emma."

"Moira," Moira says, raising her half-empty cup in a toast. “To taking over the world, then?"

"Indeed, darling," Emma says, and toasts her back.


	29. Self control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s white powder flurried across the mahogany. The razor he must have cut it with is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: Charles/Erik, Moira (implied Charles/Moira). WARNING FOR DRUG USE, CASUAL SEX. No one is particularly nice. They are however very sleazy.
> 
> Written as a response to [this a/v prompt](http://malaptica.tumblr.com/post/51687458932/visual-and-audio-prompt-sleazy-1980s-crime-au) by malaptica, looking for a 1980s Miami Vice crime AU.

He knows it’s a bad night when he can’t taste the whiskey anymore. Or hell, maybe it’s a good night. Or was. The numbers on the clock blur and run together like they’ve been poured out of a bottle, too. That could be a one, or a seven. Maybe a five.

"It’s nine in the morning," a voice that clangs like jackhammers says. He knows that voice, and the tone, both disapproving and somehow indulgent. It presses right on the pain in his temples. Moira. “It’s nine, and you’re going to have to pull yourself together, sweetie. You’re going to get a call from the precinct in fifteen minutes, and you’re going to want to be awake."

When he can focus, or get as close to focusing as he can, he stares at the bedside table. Yeah, there’s the whiskey, not even a finger left in the bottom of the bottle. There’s white powder flurried across the mahogany. The razor he must have cut it with is gone.

So, he realizes sluggishly, is Erik. The bed is a wreck, and empty except for him.

"What do they want?"

"Captain Xavier’s going to be called in on a case, if he can drag his coked-up ass out of bed." Charles groans; he doesn’t have to see her to know Moira’s smirking, but he sits up anyway. 

“You’ve got about thirteen minutes now."

Moira’s curled into a chair by the window, barely decent in her short skirt and camisole top. Charles wonders if she has a bra on. Sometimes when she’s out arranging a _rendez-vous_ for him, she doesn’t. Sometimes it means she wants to join in. Right now, Charles doubts he could get it up even if both she and Erik were climbing on top of him.

"What’s it about?" Charles asks. He pushes himself up a little straighter, mostly to make it easier to reach the whiskey.

"A murder, of course," Moira says briskly. Charles frowns at her. “And a disappearance. Both high-profile."

"Who?" God, this fucking city. He can’t crawl into a bottle and never come out, so he crawls into other people’s bodies instead. Erik’s good for that. Charles wishes he were here, wishes he could break into the Vice evidence storage locker, sell a fuckton of coke, and spirit himself and Erik off to the Caymans.

Instead, Charles drags himself to the edge of his bed, uncaring that he’s naked and covered in scratches and bites and dry come. She knows what he and Erik get up to. She’s the only person who does. She’s a good assistant.

"Janos Quested," Moira says. When Charles stares at her blankly, she elaborates, “Personal assistant and boytoy of financier Sebastian Shaw. They found him carved up in his bedroom at the Ritz. He had a condom of coke jammed up his ass. Not as much fun as having other things up there."

"Any suspects?" Charles asks. His pants are an insurmountable distance away, lying on the floor by Moira’s feet. Sighing, he wobbles over to her, manages his old smirk as she runs her eyes over him appreciatively.

"Fingerprints all over," Moira confirms. “But even better, a business card. You’ll find it familiar. Silver, embossed red M."

Charles freezes. His heart goes paralytic for a long minute before it recovers. The blood it pumps thunders hollowly in his ears.

"Nine minutes now, Charles," Moira says. For a wonder, she sounds sympathetic. “Nine minutes to figure out how you’re going to play this."


	30. The gentleman and the tramp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik snorted. “Humans and cats. They deserve each other, if you ask me. Both worthless.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: pre-slash; they are dogs; Charles is a corgi.
> 
> Originally written for kage, who wanted Charles/Erik, Lady and the Tramp style!

“Look, corgi, you’ll go home if you know what’s good for you,” Erik said, once he’d chased off the stone-throwing children.

“Not with Kurt and Cain there,” Charles told him. Erik, despite being descended from very large, undoubtedly ferocious dogs with big teeth, wasn’t half as frightening as Uncle Kurt, and nowhere near as frightening as Cain the tabby, who hissed and spat and was as ill-tempered as he was large. “Kurt, the new human, tried to muzzle me, and Cain, the cat, stole my dinner.”

Erik snorted. “Humans and cats. They deserve each other, if you ask me. Both worthless.”

“That’s not true,” Charles protested. Sharon had been perfectly lovely until Brian had gone away. Charles still grieved Brian going, and would station himself at the door every day at five o’clock, when Brian was due home from his laboratory. Brian never showed up, but Charles refused to give up hope. “It’s only Kurt and Cain, really.”

“And children. And dogcatchers,” Erik growled. “Dogcatchers like Sebastian Shaw. If I ever get the chance, I’m going to bite him.”

“Biting him won’t bring you peace, my friend,” Charles puffed. Erik had begun to trot down an alleyway, his long black-and-tan legs moving purposefully. Charles’s own, much shorter legs, had to work quickly to keep up. Being a corgi, he had a lot of energy, but that didn’t help when he had to take six strides for every one of Erik’s.

“Peace was never an option,” Erik told him firmly. “But… I suppose it would be wrong to send you back to a human stupid enough to have a cat, so you can stay with me. I’ve got a place in an abandoned house. And Moira, the human who owns the pub, gives me scraps in exchange for chasing off the rats.”

“She sounds like a good human too,” Charles pointed out.

“For a human,” Erik allowed. “Speaking of which, it’s almost eight. Time for dinner.”

Moira was gentle and friendly and the stew she ladled out into two bowls was very tasty. Charles barked and wagged his tail and she laughed, petting him on the head. When she tried to reach for his collar, though, he danced away and Erik rumbled softly.

“We’ll have to get that off you,” Erik said, as he inspected the fancy leather with Charles’s silver nametag. “No dog should be collared.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do without it,” Charles admitted. “It’s mine. It’s always been mine.”

“Not anymore,” Erik said decisively. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to Logan at the zoo. He’ll know how to get it off, if anyone does.”


	31. L'homme Xavier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles went very, very still. “The Brotherhood doesn’t exist. The Prime Minister—"
> 
> "Knows very well it exists," the man said smoothly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: preslash Charles/Erik; AU; dark(ish?)
> 
> For trobador's prompt on [XMFC by way of Luc Besson](http://trobador.tumblr.com/post/53527567475/if-luc-besson-did-first-class-accused-of-the).

"Did you enjoy your coma?"

As startling as the voice was the fact that he heard no mind formulating the thoughts that would become the words. Charles fumbled with the covers, struggling to sit up. His muscles had gone liquid, though, his bones dissolving into uselessness, and he fell back into his pillow.

Once the fear passed, anger came roaring in to replace it. It caught him up, tearing his telepathy off the chains that kept it harnessed, and he struck out with it—

And ran up against an invisible barrier, like mirrored glass. It refracted his fury back at him, stunning him almost unconscious. This did help him move, and he shoved himself up and across the bed, cursing, "Fuck you, you miserable shitstain, what the fucking hell?"He lashed out again, a scything psionic attack that had no grace in it, only a wild flailing that would have taken out anyone foolish enough to be in the room with him, if it would fucking work. Like before the energy went nowhere except back at him.

Over the galloping panic of his heart he heard a faint rustling. Licking his lips, he tasted sweat and the copper sharpness of a bloody nose. He looked up, focusing at last on his surroundings—and, finally, the man in the chair with the glass of wine at his elbow and the phone in his hand.

"Who the fuck are you?" Charles asked. His voice didn’t sound like his, creaky and stiff like an old man with arthritis. “And where the fuck am I?"

"The Ritz Genosha," the man said smoothly. He was smooth and polished as his dark suit and the expensive watch around his wrist, precise as his knotted wine-red tie. Charles hated him. 

“And I asked you a question. Did you enjoy your coma?"

"I…" Charles stared down at himself. He had hospital scrubs on, a cheap blend that irritated his skin. He wanted his own clothes back. He wanted a lot of things. He wanted the wine by the man’s elbow. Cautiously, he reached out with his telepathy again. The invisible wall was concrete now; the tendrils of his ability couldn’t penetrate it or climb it.

The man laughed and held up his phone, waggling it pointedly at Charles. “You almost got through the blocker before. You would have, if I hadn’t been juicing it up."

Charles stared at the man in baleful silence. WIth a sigh, the man said, “If you’re going to be impolite, I might as well as you another question. What’s the last thing you remember? I don’t suppose it was passing out in a pool of vodka and puke."

"I remember…" Charles froze. He didn’t remember. His last memory was of stumbling home. Raven was supposed to be there that night. He’d been drunk off his ass, trying to forget again, trying to drink the memories and fury into oblivion, and maybe that had finally worked too well.

"We had to do a hard detox," the man said, the teasing vanishing into seriousness. “It was either that or let the rest of the base experience your delirium tremens, and besides, we were on a timeline."

"A timeline." It wasn’t entirely a question.

"Yes," the man said. “Events have been developing rapidly, and we finally decided we’d best make our move, rather than watch you rot in prison."

"Prison." The room around him was all fine fabric and upholstery, rich rugs on the floor. Expensive. Charles touched the sheets pooled around his hips. Silk, of course. It suddenly all seemed like a well-appointed trap. He stared at the man, who smiled back.

"Your sister, Raven, was murdered." The words were blunt weapons, Raven, murdered, dead. He’d been supposed to meet her, home from her two years of military service. Dead. “Investigators found your psychic imprint at the scene and her body missing, except for a pool of blood. Your sister’s psychic imprint was utterly obliterated. Psionics can’t find her anywhere."

"No," Charles whispered. The rage welled up, at what the man implied, at Raven being gone. Grief was there, but deeply buried. Raven. “I didn’t do it. I’ve been fucking framed—"

"You’re as infamous for your temper as your habit of drinking your inheritance away," the man said. “Near as the investigators can tell, she said something to set you off, and you reacted."

"I never saw her that night—"

"Because you don’t remember," the man said, sounding almost sympathetic. “Your therapist’s reports say you’re prone to blackouts."

"Confidentiality isn’t worth shit to you, is it?"

"No such thing, to the Brotherhood."

Charles went very, very still. “The Brotherhood doesn’t exist. The Prime Minister—"

"Knows very well it exists," the man said smoothly. He stood up, slipping the telepathy inhibitor into the breast pocket of his jacket. Charles stared at it, willing it to break. The man was tall, his mind hidden behind the wall of the inhibitor, and he moved with subtle threat, a man who knew how imposing he was and used it to his advantage. He sat down at the edge of Charles’s bed.

This close, Charles saw his eyes were grey, with fine lines at the corners. The lines didn’t suggest age or softness, but a man who had seen many terrible things, and done some himself.

"My name is Erik Lehnsherr," the man said. Erik, Charles thought. The name fit him. Charles decided, once he could, he’d yank it out of the man’s head and leave him nameless.

Lehnsherr smiled, as if he knew every thought going through Charles’s head. Wolfish. A smile that spoke of devouring.

"I have a proposition for you," Lehnsherr said. “And I don’t believe you’ll say no."


	32. Powers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I’ve been helpless before, Charles," Raven spits out. “I’ve had people… I’ve had them treat me the way Cain treats you, and I’m not going to let it happen again. Not when I can stop it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Raven, Charles; they're kids still; bullying (awful Cain)
> 
> Originally written for our-girl-friday, who wanted a snippet having to do with powerlessness.

Raven peeps out from her hiding place. Well, his hiding place for her, a linen cupboard up in the guest wing of the mansion, around the corner from an old sitting room that no one’s entered for ages. It’s a long way from anywhere anyone goes these days, and the path to get to it is so mazelike Charles is the only one who knows it.

"Next time, I’m going to punch his lights out," Raven vows. She reaches out with her slim, small blue hand to drag Charles inside. She’s discovered she can move faster than most people, but only if she’s blue; when she wears her peaches-and-cream face (her “company clothes," she thinks of them), she can’t put all her concentration into staying safe. Not when staying not-blue takes so much work.

"Don’t do that," Charles pleads. Raven ignores him and looks him over critically. Her knack for copying people means she knows how they move and hold themselves, and Charles doesn’t seem to be moving normally. Sure enough, when she pokes at a rib, even gently, he winces. “Don’t do that, either."

"Sorry," Raven says, although she’s not sorry at all. “Charles, we need to do something. Cain is—"

"Cain’s as scared and powerless as we are," Charles corrects, sounding so boarding-school snotty and condescending Raven wants to punch him. “I can’t hurt him back, not when Kurt hurts him so badly."

"It’s a good thing I’m not as holier-than-thou as you are." Raven tucks herself into her corner, frowning at Charles. Her friend. Her brother. She loves him desperately, but god she wishes he’d just… he’d stand up for himself. She wishes he’d stand up for _her_ , if he thinks his stupid values are more important than he is.

"Raven…" Charles says helplessly. He tries to sit next to her, the way they sit snuggled in bed sometimes, but she inches away. “Raven, I don’t know—"

"I’ve been helpless before, Charles," Raven spits out. “I’ve had people… I’ve had them treat me the way Cain treats you, and I’m not going to let it happen again. Not when I can stop it."

Charles sighs. “I wish… I want to stop him," he confesses. “But what if I _do_ something." He fidgets with his hand by his head, their old signal for what Charles says is telepathy. “What if I _kill_ him?"

 _Small loss_ , Raven thinks, but she keeps that to herself. _He has it coming_ isn’t much better, but she feels that way too. Saying either of those out loud would just get her a lecture on morality from Charles, so instead, she says, “Then don’t make me hide anymore. Let me stand up for myself."

It occurs to her that, swamped in his own fears as Charles is, even his vast power can’t do anything. He’s in the place she’d been in when he’d rescued her. Raven might not be able to reach into someone’s mind and tear it apart, but she’s smart and fast and, best of all, she knows how to fight dirty.

"You’re not alone, Charles," she tells him. It sounds like a promise, the blood oath they swore one day, when they’d vowed to be friends forever. “I’ll look out for you."

When Charles rests his head on her shoulder, she allows it, and even strokes his thick, messy hair. One of his knees, bared by his short summer trousers, has a scrape on it.

"Just don’t hurt him too badly," Charles tells her.

"No promises," Raven says.


	33. Erik of the lamp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here came the sex slave, Erik thought. He hoped this human would go for moderation; the last one, so far as Erik knew, had developed back problems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Charles/Erik; AU. No warnings as such.
> 
> Written as a snippet for musingsofamoron, who wanted Erik as a genie. This is pretty ridiculous.

The first thing Erik saw once the smoke cleared was a face. A _human_ face, which was even worse.

"Seven hells," he shouted, “what the fuck is it now?"

The last time something had awoken him from blessed, peaceful, sleep, a fennec fox had been trying to cuddle with his lamp. Since apparently the sorcerer who had designed the lamp—Erik took a moment to damn him to the deepest abyss—had made it indiscriminately touch-sensitive, Erik had been forced to decipher the fox’s squeaks and growls and bring it a mate, a good water supply, and lots of food before he could go back to sleep.

And now, ugh, a human. A human who probably wanted a hot, nubile sex slave, tons of money, and triumph over their enemies. The ones who thought themselves noble would hem and haw about using their last wish to set Erik free, but they always went for one of the Big Three in the end. Erik sighed. Best to get it over with.

"How much should I write the check for?" he asked. “Or do you want to start with the sex slave? I do custom designs. Male or female?"

"Sex slaves?" asked a mild, cultured, foreign voice. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand."

"Your sex slave," Erik said patiently. He frowned down at the source of the voice, which was rather short and extremely disheveled, and staring up at Erik with wide blue eyes.

"I’m sorry, but if we can table the sex slave for the moment," the human said, “I must ask: are you a genie?"

"A djinn," Erik snapped. “Yes. You rubbed my lamp—no, that is not a euphemism—and woke me up. Here I am. Now, tell me your three wishes so I can get back to sleep."

The human ignored him. “A djinn! I must say, this is _terribly, terribly fascinating_. I’ve only read about you, you see, and when I came across your lamp and deciphered the script on it, I thought I’d, well, rub it, just for a lark you understand. And now," the human beamed at him. “here you are!"

Humans, Erik decided, had become more enthusiastic, annoying, and stupid since the last time he’d been awake. Speaking of which… “What year is this in your calendar, human?"

"2013, according to the reformed Gregorian calendar," the human answered promptly. “And, in case you’re curious, 1434 in the Islamic, 5773 in the Hebraic, and Guisi-year in the Chinese lunisolar calendar, all respectively."

"I’m not curious," Erik said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Now, how may I serve you, Master?" He added a very sarcastic bow at the end.

"Oh, I have pretty much everything I want," the human said. “I love my work, enough money to be comfortable, I’m in reasonably good health…"

Here came the sex slave, Erik thought. He hoped this human would go for moderation; the last one, so far as Erik knew, had developed back problems.

He was so busy speculating on what, precisely, the human would want, that he missed the fact that the human was saying something.

"I’m sorry," he said, “could you repeat that? I didn’t get the cup size."

"Oh, I don’t—I’m not, that is, I don’t want to offend you, but I’m not interested in that." The human blushed becomingly. “At least, not in an involuntary-servitude sense. Rather, I had been looking at the inscription on your lamp, and I thought it would be nice if I set you free."

"I’m sorry?" Erik blinked.

The human smiled. “I wish that you be free, Erik of the Lamp."

Finally, Erik thought as his incorporeal form began to solidify and weigh him down, to cage him in blood and flesh and bone the way it once did, someone got it right.


	34. Imitation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bugger the tea. Bugger Lehnsherr. Bugger everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Charles, Erik, AU in which Erik is a bossy, demanding scientist who works for playboy dilettante Charles Xavier, and David 8 is one of the methods Erik uses to torment his employer.
> 
> Inspired by [this gifset](http://lostwiginity.tumblr.com/post/34783024154/master-xavier-has-no-patience-for-his-robot-butler) by lostwiginity.

The android had blonde hair that did not exist in nature—blonde hair with dark roots, as if its creator hadn’t bothered to finish the dye job. It had wide grey eyes that wept synthetic tears and gazed serenely at Charles and held absolutely nothing and everything at once. And it had a voice that never wavered in any direction of the emotional compass, its pace and timber unvarying as a metronome.

That voice, at this very moment, relentlessly pulled Charles up from where he had curled in the peaceful cavern of too much alcohol.

"Master Xavier?" David 8 said, in precisely the same tone he used every morning. “I’m afraid it’s time to get up."

 _Two more minutes_ , Charles thought. David 8 stared calmly at him, an android’s response to an absence of stimuli and judgment for Charles forgetting, _yet again_ , that David 8 wasn’t human. Charles indicated _two more minutes_ with his fingers and rolled back over.

"I’m afraid I can’t allow that, sir," David 8 told him. He stripped the fleece blanket away, allowing cold air to rush in over Charles’s legs; Charles’s boxers offered little defense against it. “Dr. Lehnsherr is insisting that you meet him at eight precisely, as scheduled."

God, Dr. Lehnsherr. Within a day of his hiring eight years ago, he had terrorized the genomic manufacturing, cybernetics, and materials departments into submission following a coup that saw Dr. Marko ejected as the head of the DAVID project. Since that day, his influence had spread until he had reshaped Xavier Cynthetics and Robotics in his vision.

Then, as if the metaphor weren’t enough, he had gone and renovated the DAVID line, and the most recent version gazed down at Charles with the synthetic version of the same eyes that glowered at him from across his father’s desk.

 _One minute_ , Charles thought through his hatred and his hangover, and then, “I’ll be right there, David."

"Very good, sir," David said briskly. “I’ll have your tea and painkillers waiting for you as usual, sir."

 _Bugger the tea. Bugger Lehnsherr. Bugger everything._ Charles closed his eyes in futile denial and prayed for death. Or at least aspirin.


	35. The Englishman and the German

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The suspects are numerous, and formidable. Could it be the racist embarrassment to our community, the so-called Apache tracker? Has Michael Sandero’s new head developed psychic powers of a dark and malevolent nature? Or, _as is more likely_ , is it the two enigmatic visitors to our quaint little desert town, the Englishman and the German, who have only just arrived today, who have caused a stir in their shiny new car, with their accents and their foreign mystery?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: XMFC fusion with Welcome to Night Vale. No warnings as such except for existential despair.
> 
> If you haven't started listening to Night Vale yet, you really should! It is awesome. This fic is vaguely set after the first round of telepathic attacks on the school bus, but I can't remember which episode that took place in. Still, knowledge of Night Vale is not necessary -- nor is it wise to know about those things which you should not know.

The Night Vale Historical Society has unearthed a time capsule. Buried on July 14, 1813, the capsule is carven all over with mysterious runes and portentous symbols, and painted a deep, organic red—red, Night Vale citizens, as if its iron-bound clasps had also been sealed with blood. As if, dear listeners, the time capsule is not a time capsule, but instead a prison for some unknown, yet potent, horror. Historians with the Night Vale Historical Society plan to hold a press conference at an undisclosed location, which will remain undisclosed, to announce their findings.

The time capsule itself had no comment, but emitted an ominous aura that caused all around it to tremble with an inexplicable fear, as if they had suddenly been placed at the edge of a vast, fathomless abyss.

Don’t forget the annual Arts Festival, held this Saturday at the Night Vale Arts Center. The masterpieces of the Sheriff’s Secret Police and the ever-benevolent, all-wise City Council will be on auction in order to fund the expansion of the dog park. Bidding is required and involuntary. Any citizen failing to take home a piece of art will be detained in the mine shaft outside of town.

In breaking news: Night Vale citizens, we have yet _another_ telepathic ambush on our hands! This time, the driver and passengers in the Night Vale Independent Living Community shuttle bus found themselves drowned in their darkest imaginings, the long-interred monsters of their forgotten memories rising up out of the tar-like, turbid depths of their subconscious, while en route to Bingo Night at the Elks Lodge. The Sheriff’s Secret Police is investigating. Until the resolution of this case, citizens can expect unexpected interrogations and to have their movements and thoughts monitored at all times. Calling in to the tip line with any information will be unnecessary; the Secret Police will have it by the time you pick up the phone.

Our resident scientist, Carlos of the brilliant mind and even more-brilliant hair, has interviewed the retirees but has obtained little more than incoherent moans. Gladys Gillman, 87, reportedly clutched the sleeve of his finely-woven, aesthetically-pleasing shirt, and gazing up into his limpid eyes, so kind and yet so full of wisdom, whispered _He has come. He is here._ Doubtless Carlos, his heart as generous as it is wise, comforted her, his capable hands, so deft with any number of scientific apparatuses, gentle on her blue-rinsed hair as he whispered soothing words.

Now, I don’t know about you, listeners, but I personally am more angered than frightened at these attacks. In fact, I’m not just angry, I’m determined—determined to get to the bottom of this. Investigative journalism is what distinguishes good community radio from the twaddle you hear on public access, after all.

The suspects are numerous, and formidable. Could it be the racist embarrassment to our community, the so-called Apache tracker? Has Michael Sandero’s new head developed psychic powers of a dark and malevolent nature? Or, _as is more likely_ , is it the two enigmatic visitors to our quaint little desert town, the Englishman and the German, who have only just arrived today, who have caused a stir in their shiny new car, with their accents and their foreign mystery?

In possibly-related news—for all, dear listeners, is related, all is bound together inextricably, in chains of dark, unbreakable adamant—Khoshekh, the cat in the men’s bathroom of the station, has begun to spin.

And now, a word from our sponsors.

* * *

I apologize to you one and all, listening audience, for the unexpectedly long word from our sponsors. It appears that my disparaging comments directed toward public access television were not received favorably by the producers of Channel 666, Night Vale’s public access station, and as a result I have spent the last ten minutes pinned under my desk, sheltering from a vicious barrage of dead and diseased animal carcasses hurled at me by Channel 666’s trebuchet.

Under normal circumstances, I would apologize for slighting fellow members of community-based media, but really, flinging plague-riddled corpses at my recording studio is a bit of an overreaction, don’t you think?

Again, to my _loyal_ followers, I offer my apologies. I hope you enjoyed learning about the many physical, mental, and existential health benefits conferred to you by high fructose corn syrup. Remember: don’t start your day without it! And as you suck down your soda-pop or sports drinks, remember that with each sip you quench not only your thirst, but the haunting, nearly-inescapable despair that colors your life, like the yellowish, dreary fog that emanates from Radon Canyon.

Before proceeding with updates regarding the recent psychic attacks against Night Vale’s elderly, yet still hale and hearty, population, this urgent community announcement: The Night Vale Children’s Chorus is beginning rehearsals for its Spring Recital today. Residents are advised to stay inside with all doors and windows well-locked and warded until 5pm.

Now, Night Vale, I must report to you this stunning development: one of the outsiders has come to my humble recording studio! Yes, he came, negotiating the swollen, fetid bodies of cows and pigs, as well as the pile of rubble that had once been the ceiling, to speak with me, Cecil, your friendly and useful community radio broadcaster.

When I first laid eyes on him, I was instantly reminded of my dear, beautiful Carlos. We might have thought his title to the crown unchallenged before, listeners, but the Englishman—for the Englishman it was—possesses wavy locks that can aspire to unseat Carlos’s magnificent coif from the lofty heights of hair perfection. Curse that thought! He can only be a pretender to that throne.

He came, the Englishman explained, because he was searching for “extraordinary individuals" and he thought I might be of help. I found his accent soothing, a balm for a spirit besieged by doubts of its own existence, and a balm for a body buffeted by dead chickens and drywall. His eyes are limpid, blue, clear and bottomless as a tropical lagoon, into which you might fall—and fall—and keep falling, forever, your soul given up to a most terrible and all-consuming bliss.

I tried to rally myself against his influence and shook my head. After all, Night Vale is a town where the only thing we must fear is ourselves.

"But," he pressed, “have you seen anything you can’t explain?"

 _Have I seen anything I can’t explain?_ What a question! I swept my desk clear of dust and bits of what might have been Intern Ashley.

I’ve seen many things I can’t explain, I told him. Take the sun: What is it? Is it a ball of plasma, a vast nuclear reactor churning away in the abyss? Is it the wheel of a chariot spinning across the sky? Or is it the servant of the City Council, its all-seeing eye parching the land with heat and drying our souls with terror of the judgments it undoubtedly makes upon us?

Take myself: what am I? I have recently decided that, while _I_ may exist, what am _I_? Am I a body and an incorporeal soul—or (and I feel this is far more likely to be true; the conviction has been growing, or not growing, steadily for some time) am I simply a voice, a thing that has its existence only in the ephemerality of words, channeled through this apparatus of flesh and bone?

There are many other things that remain unexplained, save for the explanations of the City Council, all glory be to them.

Then I demanded to know his name and his business.

"My name is Charles Xavier," he said in his dulcet accent, an accent that tempted me to believe him. “I’m a scientist."

A scientist! A scientist named Charles with perfect hair. Charles, of course, is the English version of Carlos, both ultimately deriving from _*karlon_ in the Proto-Germanic, meaning “man." Perhaps he is Carlos’s British doppelgänger. Steven McNulty, a sixth-grade teacher at Night Vale Junior High, has a doppelgänger, Etienne, who is Quebecois but has Steven’s tattoos, missing third finger on the left hand, and thinning black hair.

Admittedly, beyond the hair and the fact that they share a name and occupation, there are few (if any) similarities between Carlos and Charles. But this is only further evidence, dear listeners, that this Charles is an exceptionally cunning doppelgänger.

Doppelgängers, as we know, cannot be trusted. They are all of them uniformly evil, except for Steven’s. Etienne is a beacon of light and goodness, while Steven is known far and wide as a   
grifter and ruthless murderer. I instantly felt, based on my reaction to his glorious hair and the crystalline perfection of his blue eyes, I ought not to trust this Charles.

"You should ask the City Council," I told him, imagining him going before that august body, whose collective consciousness manifests itself only in the most terrifying of sounds and edicts carved on the thigh bones of heretics, for to question the unexplained in Night Vale is, of course, a grave heresy.

"Thank you for your help," Carlos’s doppelgänger said very courteously, and he left in the same polite, entrancing way in which he had entered.

In sports, the Night Vale Heat, our own inimitable hockey team, has begun fundraising for an outdoor rink. Those reluctant to donate can expect to be visited by three of their larger defensemen.

And now, the weather.


	36. Moving day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik stared at the opposite wall of his apartment. The bare opposite wall, blank off-white paint lit only by the light from the kitchen. The empty kitchen, which had only a grocery bag containing peanut butter, jelly, and plasticware in it. For that matter, the entirety of the apartment contained nothing other than the grocery bag, suitcase, air mattress, and Erik, and a miasma of despair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: for **ike** on Tumblr, who prompted "Erik moves cities and somehow the moving trucks lose everything. He's left with an empty apartment with barely any money to get new things, since he'd moved to take a new job. Luckily, his next-door neighbor Charles is much more friendly and accommodating than he'd expected. :)"

The day had begun well, Erik discovering that the apartment he’d rented sight-unseen had an elevator and a discreet M-X sticker on the window next to the sticker for the security company. The other tenant in the building hadn’t bothered him as Erik had lugged his few belongings up the walk. The moving company hadn’t called him with news of any disasters—in fact, he hadn’t heard anything since two days ago, which should have been a sign.

 _I’m sorry sir._ The voice of the “moving assistant” started to blur, the nasal honking of one of the adults’ voices in the old Peanuts cartoons. _But you opted out of full loss coverage, so blah blah honk blah blah you’re fucked. Good bye._

Erik stared at the opposite wall of his apartment. The bare opposite wall, blank off-white paint lit only by the light from the kitchen. The empty kitchen, which had only a grocery bag containing peanut butter, jelly, and plasticware in it. For that matter, the entirety of the apartment contained nothing other than the grocery bag, suitcase, air mattress, and Erik, and a miasma of despair.

A brisk knock sounded on his door. Erik sent the knocker a silent order to go away. Three raps answered him, as businesslike as the first. Erik considered it might be the person downstairs from him, complaining about the stomping around, or might be the mysterious landlord, who had missed Erik’s moving-in appointment but left his keys under the potted plant by the door.

Fighting a headache and the task of having to be nice to a human being on a day where the human race had failed him utterly, Erik picked himself up and slouched over to the door.

"Hello!" said the young, excessively British person on Erik’s step. "I would say ‘good day,’ but it seems as if you’re having a rather terrible one.”

"Yes," Erik said. Now that he was paying attention, he sensed the metal of the wheelchair and realized the necessity for an elevator in what should have been a two-story walkup. "Who are you?"

"Charles," the British person said. "I wanted to be sure you were well—or, as well as circumstances permit." He tapped his forehead. "You were very angry, understandably so. Are, I should say.”

Great, a telepath. No wonder the rent was so low. The thought flashed through Erik’s head, too fast for Erik to grab it and haul it back to being unthought. Charles’s smile, which was very bright and far more honest than Erik deserved, didn’t waver, but Erik knew Charles had to have heard him.

"Sorry," Erik muttered gracelessly. "I didn’t—"

"I know," Charles said, with the unruffled British politeness that, somehow, made Erik’s fuckup even worse. “It is partly true, disclosure being what it is, but mostly it’s because I don’t have to charge much for rent as it is.”

The words took a moment to penetrate.

"You’re my landlord?" Erik stared.

Charles beamed. “Yes! I apologize for not meeting you earlier, but I’d forgotten about an appointment I couldn’t miss. I’m glad to see you made it in relatively unscathed.”

"Tell that to my stuff," Erik said. How the hell did you just lose a moving truck?

"Oh." Charles actually made a clucking sound. "That is very unfortunate. You must not have brought much with you—oh, that is not good. Why don’t you come down with me and I can make you some tea and some lunch and we can figure out what to do? I’m sure some of my neighbors will help out, and you’ll need to meet Raven, Angel, and the others anyway.”

Erik wanted to protest that he definitely did not need to meet anyone, promise of lunch notwithstanding, but when he opened his mouth to decline, he heard himself saying “Sure, just let me get my keys,” and he’d summoned his keys over before he even thought of it.

And so he found himself down in the sunny front room of his landlord’s first-floor apartment, under strict orders to relax while his landlord—who was also his apartment neighbor and a genetics professor _and his landlord_ —made sandwiches and cut up fruit and cheese and opened two bottles of beer. Erik stared around at the room, which was the interior decoration equivalent of what he suspected Charles must actually be like, with photographs on the wall and a chess set on a table by a bookcase stuffed helter-skelter with books, low-set furniture covered with cheerful afghans and a creaky but smooth wood floor underneath it all.

Despite Erik’s repeated offers of help, and assertions that Charles was doing too much and he was fine, Charles made lunch and would have brought it out to Erik except for the awkwardness of managing wheelchair and tray. Erik took care of the latter, finding the small metal screws holding the tray together and floating it out to him. When he wheeled into the room a moment later, Charles was smiling.

"Welcome to Westchester," Charles said. "Now eat your lunch."


	37. Birds and cats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik versus a cat!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: For **astasia** , who prompted something from her parrot!AU. They are birds in this one. Raven is a cat.

From what Erik understands of Hank’s obnoxious, human song-speech, Charles is supposed to be a very intelligent bird. Charles knows many human words, and even knows how to put them together into sentences, and has exhibited what Hank calls problem-solving abilities that set him apart from all other cockatiels. Erik doesn’t quite know what those are, but he’s fairly sure, from the glint in Hank’s eye, that it has to do with how much meat he’ll be able to get off Charles one day.

Of course, that day might never come because a greater enemy even than their human captor—even than the human who had tried to eat Charles—is now lying in the center of Erik’s living room. Hank lives under the delusion this is his space, but clearly Erik alone can be entrusted with its defense because Hank does stupid, stupid things like leaving the door open while he goes to get coffee.

The great enemy, of course, is the gray-blue cat that Erik has seen prowling around outside. Only now it’s inside and peering at him with gold eyes alight with lazy, evil, cat satisfaction. It’s inside, and even worse, Erik thinks with a shiver that goes all the way to the tips of his feathers, Charles is trying to make friends with it.

"Charles!" he shouts as he waddles as quickly as he can across the floor. "Charles, I’m coming! Don’t let it eat you!"

"Erik, don’t be silly," Charles says. "Raven is our friend."

"Purr," says the cat. "Charrrrles, if you could get rrrrrright behind my earrrr?"

"Of course, darling," Charles tells the cat. He leans up from his perch on the cat’s shoulder to scratch behind her ear with his beak.

"Unhand him, you fiend!" Erik puffs himself up, trying to impress upon the cat that he is very large and not to be trifled with. "Let Charles go this instant and I won’t turn you into cat steaks."

"Yourrrrr frrrrriend needs to calm down," says Raven the cat.

"He’s just very slow to trust people," Charles says, with an air of perfect unconcern.

"Considering the last time you were nice to someone invading our territory, he tried to eat you, that’s ridiculous,” Erik splutters, forgetting to be intimidating.

"Oh, Erik," Charles clucks. "Hank never would have let that happen."

Erik does not trust Hank’s ability to keep them safe, not in the least. The human seems barely capable of keeping himself from harm, much less a large, competent eclectus parrot and an overly trusting, tiny, fragile cockatiel. Speaking of which…. the cat. The cat is still here, still probably waiting for the chance to strike. He opens his beak menacingly, to show that cat what it would have to deal with if it even so much as twitches without Erik’s permission.

"I’m not going to eat your boyfrrrrrrriend," Raven sighs. "He gives good ear scratches, and anyways, I already ate a chipmunk."

"You did not," Charles scolds, nipping the tip of Raven’s ear. "Don’t upset Erik, darling. His feathers are still growing back in."

Erik doesn’t really hear the part about the chipmunk, too busy thinking about Raven’s other words. _He’s not my boyfriend_ , part of him wants to say, because Erik is a strong, solitary eclectus parrot who has no need for cheerful, chattery cockatiels named Charles. But, he thinks, as he watches Charles rearrange Raven’s fur (and Raven flop limply on her side, purring madly) and listens to him tell her about all the tests Hank has him do, and the special peanut butter treat they got the other day, that might not be as true as it once was.

Especially because he wants Charles to do that to him.


	38. Erik and Lord Xavier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Hey!" the driver said over the intercom. "Izzat you doing that? Knock it the — I mean, sir, if you would be so kind as to — "
> 
> A great flash of light enveloping the car, electricity saturating the air, and a heavy thump and lurch interrupted the driver’s imprecations. The tires screeched weakly on the wet cement and Erik was catapulted forward against his seatbelt. He was finding breath to excoriate the driver when he heard the panicked “Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck, oh shit” coming over the intercom, and realized that the idiot had hit someone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: For **Ces** on Tumblr, who asked for a romcom. This is a modern romcom AU with.... TIME TRAVEL.

Because this was the way of things, the storm broke twenty minutes before Erik Lehnsherr absolutely had to leave the office. Outside the windows of Eisenhardt Ltd., the sky darkened as if someone had thrown a switch, and then, as if someone had thrown yet another switch, lightning whipcracked over the city, thunder boomed melodramatically, and the rain came bucketing down.

Erik mowed down another hapless pedestrian on his way to the town car. The driver of the town car, unsheltered by any umbrella, prudently cowered behind the opened rear passenger-side door, only to have it yanked out of his grip when Erik decided to close the door himself. A moment later, the door opened a crack so Erik could shout “I haven’t got all day!” and so the driver could retreat to the safety of the driver’s eat - and raise the privacy panel.

In the back, Erik scowled out the tinted windows at the city crawling by. His day had already been filled with idiots and now his evening would be too, with Sebastian Shaw’s tedious gala to benefit mutant rights. Erik was as ardent a supporter of mutant rights as anyone, but Shaw’s mutant ability seemed to be to absorb kinetic energy and redirect it as a truly obnoxious grandiosity, and to coat his body and everything he touched with a thin sheen of oily superciliousness. Erik could practically feel it on him already, and they still had ten blocks to go, wading through the tempest, to the Waldorf.

Perhaps it was his desire to get the evening with as swiftly as possible so he could go home and be a misanthrope (Raven’s term, not his), but he found himself wrapping his power around the car, trying to nudge it forward just a little faster. 

"Hey!" the driver said over the intercom. "Izzat you doing that? Knock it the — I mean, sir, if you would be so kind as to — "

A great flash of light enveloping the car, electricity saturating the air, and a heavy thump and lurch interrupted the driver’s imprecations. The tires screeched weakly on the wet cement and Erik was catapulted forward against his seatbelt. He was finding breath to excoriate the driver when he heard the panicked “Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck, oh shit” coming over the intercom, and realized that the idiot had hit someone.

Erik yanked the privacy screen back. Through the little rectangle, he saw the driver’s hunched back, a pale hand that did not belong to the driver flailing at the hood of the car. Horns raised in a cacophony behind them, but Erik could hear the driver’s high-pitched and hysterical, “Buddy, hey, mister, you okay? Didn’t see you, what the hell — ” and then something Erik hoped had to do with the stupidity of darting across traffic against the light in a New York City rush hour.

The rest of the owner of the pale hand emerged slowly, moving gingerly against what Erik suspected would be at least bruised ribs.

Having lived in New York City for nearly his entire life, Erik considered himself immune to nearly all extraordinary phenomena. This included the still-staggering victim of the driver’s incompetence, who wore a high-collared green coat and a sad, sodden-looking white cravat, and had what might otherwise be a full head of brown hair plastered flat. He and the driver were exchanging words, which remarkably did not seem to be threats of lawsuits—that was actually rather more extraordinary than the young man’s appearance (he was, in fact, young, or at least looked as much). In fact, the driver moved to assist him, taking him by the elbow and helping him over to—

Erik opened his mouth to protest. No. He had hired this car, he was already late, and he was not going to share his car with a soaking wet imbecile on his way to some historical reenactment. Despite the strength of Erik’s silent objections, the other door opened and the young man was deposited in a wet, ungainly heap on the seat next to Erik.

"Who the hell are you?" Erik said wrathfully. "I have very good lawyers."

"Charles Xavier, Earl of Westchester, at your service, sir," the young man said, bowing rather stiffly. A drop of water ran off his nose and hit the leather of the seat. "I would greet you in the manner of your own people and I deeply regret my interruption of your journey and any damage caused to your conveyance, but I beg your forgiveness, I do not quite know when I am."


	39. And I woke up in Elysium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The place next to him is still warm, just a bit, as if a body hasn’t long been out of it. Erik tries not to think about how much that comforts him, but the notion sticks nonetheless. It’s persistent, like Charles is. Not long ago, Erik would have hated that a lot, but now he can only smile ruefully and admit that, in the strange game of the past year, he’s both won and lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: for **fealle** on Tumblr. Modern AU, notes for age difference (Erik is younger; everyone involved is legal).

Erik wakes up far later than he wants—far later than he should—and alone. For a moment the urge to lash out nearly has him grabbing the wrought-iron bedstead or balcony and yanking until the metal warps and comes apart—but then there’s the peculiar electromagnetic resonance of Charles’s telepathy that says he isn’t far. The possibility that Charles has overheard Erik’s panic-anger-attack has Erik reaching for metal anyway, but he only holds it in the invisible grip of his ability, clinging tight until he can breathe his way to calmness.

The place next to him is still warm, just a bit, as if a body hasn’t long been out of it. Erik tries not to think about how much that comforts him, but the notion sticks nonetheless. It’s persistent, like Charles is. Not long ago, Erik would have hated that a lot, but now he can only smile ruefully and admit that, in the strange game of the past year, he’s both won and lost.

Speaking of Charles, now that Erik’s looking and thinking, he senses the smoky-hot coils of the hotel suite’s electric water-heater, their heat steady to keep the water hot for tea or coffee. Tea, probably; Charles has more of that in his circulatory system than blood. British right down to the bone.

Resigning himself to wakefulness, Erik gets up. He thinks about wrapping a sheet around himself—or the plush robe that’s hanging on the hook of the bathroom door—but he’s still sleepy-warm and their thermostat is turned up for Charles’s sake. He considers going naked, but that’s too forward, this thing between them still too new and fragile for something that bold. He steps into yesterday’s boxers instead.

The look Charles gives him when he wanders out of their bedroom and into the breakfast nook ( _our room—our suite—has a breakfast nook_ , Erik thinks, still overcome by the idea, the fact that Charles has this much money) says his choice is worth it.

It’s the look and the sudden spill of affection into Erik’s mind, that does it, the picture of himself: a rangy boy with pale, bruise-marked skin, colored with morning sunlight and admiration and something Erik can’t examine too closely. Erik wants to hate it, wants to search out what he’s sure is lying beneath it, but along with those emotions comes Charles’s sincerity, and Erik’s determination to resent him melts.

"I hope you slept well," Charles says as he takes a sip of tea. It’s a completely innocent remark, with no hint of what, precisely, they got up to before they’d mutually exhausted each other the night before. In his own robe, with its thick white collar tucked close around him and his rumpled rat’s-nest of brown hair, he looks as innocent as the words.

"Fine," Erik says as he drops into his own chair. He surveys Charles briefly, unable to stop himself; it’s a habit cultivated over the past year, of looking to be sure Charles is well. As always, the wheelchair infuriates him, rickety plastic framing cheap metal. He distracts himself from that by concentrating on the tablet in Charles’s hand. "I thought we weren’t working this weekend."

"I had an idea that woke me up," Charles says ruefully. "You’re very inspirational." _My muse_ , Charles says in his silent voice, perhaps not meaning to be overheard. _I wanted to stay with you, but you were so peaceful. I didn’t want to disturb._

Erik snorts at the picture of himself asleep, tells himself he should be freaked out or pissed at being observed so closely, even if it is Charles, who gets to see him vulnerable—who’s looked straight through him and seen everything.

He pours a cup of coffee from the carafe. “Moira told me I wasn’t to let you work until we got back to the office. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

"That’s the first time I’ve heard those words come out of your mouth," Charles says. He says it with a laugh that’s more kindness than teasing, although Erik blushes anyway. Charles sets down tablet and cup and leans back in his chair, the stiff, half-articulated motion Erik now knows comes from his paralysis. He hadn’t been much older than Erik when his accident had happened—twenty-two, Erik remembers.

"But if you must know, I’ve felt better lately." He swipes a finger aimlessly across the tablet’s surface, changing the display. "The ideas are coming again, finally, after ten years."

"I’m glad," Erik says. He focuses on adding sugar and cream, fastening his power into the sterling silver spoon to stir it all together. It’s easier than thinking about the contentment spreading out from Charles, filling the room with its own liquid warmth, as pervasive as the sun coming through the huge windows.

It’s easier than thinking he’s the reason for it.


	40. Life of Ω (3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He told himself it was only this or hypothermia as he got up and brushed off the sand. He was not in heat, he was in complete control of himself, _this is completely and utterly platonic, you are not admitting anything by doing this_ —he chanted this over and over on the walk over to where Erik lay on their ridiculous bed of palm fronds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: A/O, beleaguered Charles. A continuation from Astasia's delightful comic, [here](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/58839176919/astasia-life-of-omega-is-back-lovely-cherik)! Thank you to her for letting me play in her lovely verse <3

"Why is it," Charles fumed, "that whenever an omega is angry or merely the slightest bit annoyed, they have to be in heat? Alphas are permitted to have bad days, or to be upset about things that upset them, but no, I’m an omega so it has to be my hormones, right?”

"No," Erik said, which was wise of him. "Can I come down?"

"Yes, but… just keep your pheromones away from me." Charles backed away, waiting until he was safely upwind of Erik before turning around. He heard the soft rustle of Erik descending from his perch, and then the uncomfortable deepening of the silence between them that said Erik was trying to think of something to say, but couldn’t.

Once he was sure Erik had given up and gone back to sleep, Charles curled up on the sand next to their lifeboat, tucking his knees up to his chest and hunching down to shelter from the night breeze. There was a reason they slept together, with the nights running much cooler after the hot, tropical days, however much Erik teased him about an alpha’s higher body temperature and keeping Charles warm.

Erik. Charles tried very hard to think the name spitefully. He reminded himself of all the reasons why Erik would be a terrible, terrible choice as a sexual partner, to say nothing of a bondmate: he was arrogant, barely domesticated, he had a scent every molecule of Charles’s traitorous body wanted to roll around in, and most importantly Charles was not going to leap into bed (or, god forbid, a bond) with the first person who jump-started his hormones.

And he was especially not going to leap into bed with someone who had just starred in a dream that, Charles decided, qualified as a nightmare. He ignored the quiver of interest at the dream-memory of Erik whispering in his ear and tried to concentrate on how the entire production was straight out of one of those novels Raven always read.

 _Omega and proud, big brother_ , she’d say when Charles indignantly read her passage after passage about kidnapped omegas, governess-tutor omegas, dispossessed inheritor omegas, pirate captain omegas, falling in love with the mysteriously brooding alpha love interest—or rather with his pheromones. _It’s all a bloody chemical reaction! he’d half-shout, while Raven laughed at him. Why is it we’re expected to do what our bodies want without a second thought? Maybe I don’t want that. Maybe I want to choose who to be with._

And then Raven would whack him over the head with the book in question and say _It’s not an either-or proposition, Charles. Maybe your heart and brain can want the same thing. And your hormones too._

"Shut up, Raven," Charles said into his crossed arms. "We’re nothing alike. We’ve got nothing in common. He’s practically half-wild, and I don’t want to have to give up my career to spend the rest of my life domesticating him."

 _He does have a career._ They’d talked about it during one of the very long days on the lifeboat, after Charles’s heat had finally, mercifully, ended. Erik was a physicist, when he wasn’t trying to demonstrate his hunting-and-providing prowess for Charles. He liked history. He traveled a lot. Charles was a geneticist, and he happened to enjoy history and traveling as well. And both of you have been stuck on a lifeboat after your cruise ship capsized. So you’ve got that in common.

Charles shook his head. _No. No, no, no, and no yet again. It’s never going to happen. I’m never going to be his omega._ A small voice whispered that he could be, if he wanted; all he had to do would be to go over to Erik, run his hand down that strong, lovely back, and bend over his ear and whisper okay, yes, I’m yours and then Erik would turn to look at him and cup Charles’s face, his thumb playing across his cheekbone, and give Charles a sweet smile, so completely—

"NO!" Charles shouted. He had never once seen Erik smile sweetly. Erik probably wasn’t capable of anything besides a smirk or a leer or the kind of smile that belonged on sharp-toothed beings like tigers and sharks.

"Charles?’ Erik asked sleepily from their bed. (Not our bed, Charles seethed.) “Charles, are you okay?”

"Yes," Charles said, loud enough for Erik to hear. Into his folded arms, he muttered, "No, no. No, I’m really not."

Some space of the night passed. Charles couldn’t say how long, only that the moon had moved and the stars seemed different against the utter black of the sky. It grew colder, and the spray from the waves mingled with the air and settled onto his skin, settled into it, and soon Charles couldn’t ignore his shivering or his chattering teeth and how his body had locked up.

He told himself it was only this or hypothermia as he got up and brushed off the sand. He was not in heat, he was in complete control of himself, _this is completely and utterly platonic, you are not admitting anything by doing this_ —he chanted this over and over on the walk over to where Erik lay on their ridiculous bed of palm fronds. As quietly as he could, Charles folded himself onto the very edge of their bed and, after a moment broken only by Erik’s breathing, inched closer.

By degrees, and repetitions of his mantra and reminders to himself if Erik tried anything Charles would punch him in the nose or any other vulnerable body part, he maneuvered himself closer and closer, and closer still, until he felt the heat coming off Erik’s body. He stared at the broad wall of Erik’s back, at the freckles and small marks and scars of an active life and, just to prove to himself he could and not give into temptation, settled his hand a scant inch away from touching.


	41. Spoiler alert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magneto often ranted to Charles, Raven or anyone who would listen about the stupidity of the vernacular “X is so-and-so’s mutant power.” It reduced, he argued, the terrifying majesty of abilities such as, say, metallokinesis and magnokinesis to the level of being adorable or being chronically late for meetings. _Being cute is his mutant power_ , some idiot human might say, or _Being late to everything is her mutant ability_ , and it drove Magneto up the wall that humans were allowed to say these things openly and without punishment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: For **clarasteam** on Tumblr, who wanted a bit of something from the [Magical X-Men 'verse](http://archiveofourown.org/works/672881/chapters/1231029). Modern AU, some ableism, mostly happiness and Magneto being Magneto.

Magneto often ranted to Charles, Raven or anyone who would listen about the stupidity of the vernacular “X is so-and-so’s mutant power.” It reduced, he argued, the terrifying majesty of abilities such as, say, metallokinesis and magnokinesis to the level of being adorable or being chronically late for meetings. _Being cute is his mutant power_ , some idiot human might say, or _Being late to everything is her mutant ability_ , and it drove Magneto up the wall that humans were allowed to say these things openly and without punishment.

However, stubbornness was, quite legitimately, one of Charles’s secondary mutations, Magneto decided. Even with reviews from the latest—the bombshell— _Magical X-Men_ expected nearly any minute now, Charles sat straight and immovable in his wheelchair, and almost unconcerned, as if the reaction of his legions of fans didn’t matter.

Which, of course, it shouldn’t. Magneto refused to countenance, even for a moment, the thought that the opinions of the great unwashed mattered when it came to _Magical X-Men_. His own opinions mattered, of course, and while he had had certain ideas regarding the wisdom of Charles’s choices regarding the direction of the comic, Charles had ultimately prevailed.

While Magneto did not wish to call what they had had a fight, it had involved Charles inflicting a very uncomfortable headache on him before banishing him to the couch for the night, The following evening they had made up, and Charles had even, in apology for the headache, allowed Magneto to make use of the conquering cape.

Charles’s computer chimed at him, breaking into Magneto’s memories of just how good Charles’s mouth was at certain activities that did not happen to be talking.

"It’s from Comics Watch,” Charles said tensely. He opened the email and clicked the link.

"It’s a human-centric publication. You shouldn’t care what they write," Magneto warned him.

"I do have to care," Charles said. "If the backlash to my putting Professor X in a wheelchair is violent enough… I don’t want to backtrack," he continued after a pause. "And I won’t, but still.” _It will hurt_ , he added.

"Fair-weather fans," Magneto snorted. "How can you take over the world if your followers desert you at the first sign of trouble?"

Charles sighed, his familiar you are not taking over the world sigh, although his mouth tilted up a little. “We’ll worry about that in the event I do want to become a tyrant,” he said, “but for now, let me read.”

"Don’t read the comments section," Magneto warned. "God only knows what quasi-literate, rabid nonsense you’ll find."

Charles was leaning forward slightly in his wheelchair, mouth moving silently along with the words. Magneto tried mutantfully not to fidget or play with his cape (the clean conquering cape, worn for good luck), until Charles at last relented and began to read telepathically.

> We all knew something big was coming, but we didn’t really know what; given it took so many years to learn the true identity of the creator of Magical X-Men, we were lucky to hear even the little bit we did about a “major shake-up” happening in the team.
> 
> Naturally, a lot of fans are going to be disappointed. Professor X is a perennial fan favorite, featuring prominently in almost every major storyline in the comics and television canon. “Professor X is going to end up being stuck in the mansion,” they’ll say. “He’s going to be boring. Metallic Man is going to have to break up with him.”
> 
> Many—namely those who didn’t or won’t read CX’s postscript—will have their own breakup with the series, not liking the certainty that Magical X-Men has always provided in an uncertain world. But CX explains that Professor X ending up a paraplegic will not mean the end of the character or his centrality in the series: “One of my goals with the comic was to give everyone—not just mutants, but everyone who’s felt different—a new way to think about the world. I wanted to help people. But now I also want to show people that you can be in a wheelchair, or leg braces, or have a prosthetic, whatever, and still be able to do amazing things. While he’ll have to adjust to this new life and struggle with how he’s had it forced on him, Professor X will also learn how he can keep working toward his dreams, and his team—and Metallic Man, of course—won’t need him any less.”

Charles sighed in relief. “It seems like they got it.”

"Miracles do happen," Magneto grumbled, although he was not, of course, angry that a baseline comics blog had seen the merit of Charles’s creative decisions. He was happy; humans acting in a rational and enlightened manner was a good thing, and to be encouraged. It was just very disappointing to have humans more than live up to his very low expectations of them.

"Be kind, Erik," Charles said reprovingly. He clicked through a couple more links, one of which was approving, the other cautious.

Magneto snorted. “Are you going to be glued to that thing for the rest of the night?”

"I could be persuaded away from it," Charles said with a smile, giving the conquering cape a meaningful look.


	42. You belong to the city

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It’s nine in the morning," a voice that clangs like jackhammers says. He knows that voice, and the tone, both disapproving and somehow indulgent. It presses right on the pain in his temples. Moira. "It’s nine, and you’re going to have to pull yourself together, sweetie. You’re going to get a call from the precinct in fifteen minutes, and you’re going to want to be awake."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: For **malaptica** , inspired by [this gifset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/53604735754/malaptica-malaptica-jabletown).
> 
> WARNINGS WARNINGS WARNINGS for: drug use, prostitution, alcoholism, corruption, general awfulness on everyone's part

He knows it’s a bad night when he can’t taste the whiskey anymore. Or hell, maybe it’s a good night. Or was. The numbers on the clock blur and run together like they’ve been poured out of a bottle, too. That could be a one, or a seven. Maybe a five.

"It’s nine in the morning," a voice that clangs like jackhammers says. He knows that voice, and the tone, both disapproving and somehow indulgent. It presses right on the pain in his temples. Moira. "It’s nine, and you’re going to have to pull yourself together, sweetie. You’re going to get a call from the precinct in fifteen minutes, and you’re going to want to be awake."

When he can focus, or get as close to focusing as he can, he stares at the bedside table. Yeah, there’s the whiskey, not even a finger left in the bottom of the bottle. There’s white powder flurried across the mahogany. The razor he must have cut it with is gone.

So, he realizes sluggishly, is Erik. The bed is a wreck, and empty except for him.

"What do they want?"

"Captain Xavier’s going to be called in on a case, if he can drag his coked-up ass out of bed." Charles groans; he doesn’t have to see her to know Moira’s smirking, but he sits up anyway. "You’ve got about thirteen minutes now."

Moira’s curled into a chair by the window, barely decent in her short skirt and camisole top. Charles wonders if she has a bra on. Sometimes when she’s out arranging a _rendez-vous_ for him, she doesn’t. Sometimes it means she wants to join in. Right now, Charles doubts he could get it up even if both she and Erik were climbing on top of him.

"What’s it about?" Charles asks. He pushes himself up a little straighter, mostly to make it easier to reach the whiskey.

"A murder, of course," Moira says briskly. Charles frowns at her. "And a disappearance. Both high-profile."

"Who?" God, this fucking city. He can’t crawl into a bottle and never come out, so he crawls into other people’s bodies instead. Erik’s good for that. Charles wishes he were here, wishes he could break into the Vice evidence storage locker, sell a fuckton of coke, and spirit himself and Erik off to the Caymans.

Instead, Charles drags himself to the edge of his bed, uncaring that he’s naked and covered in scratches and bites and dry come. She knows what he and Erik get up to. She’s the only person who does. She’s a good assistant.

"Janos Quested," Moira says. When Charles stares at her blankly, she elaborates, "Personal assistant and boytoy of financier Sebastian Shaw. They found him carved up in his bedroom at the Ritz. He had a condom of coke jammed up his ass. Not as much fun as having other things up there."

"Any suspects?" Charles asks. His pants are an insurmountable distance away, lying on the floor by Moira’s feet. Sighing, he wobbles over to her, manages his old smirk as she runs her eyes over him appreciatively.

"Fingerprints all over," Moira confirms. "But even better, a business card. You’ll find it familiar. Silver, embossed red M."

Charles freezes. His heart goes paralytic for a long minute before it recovers. The blood it pumps thunders hollowly in his ears.

"Nine minutes now, Charles," Moira says. For a wonder, she sounds sympathetic. "Nine minutes to figure out how you’re going to play this."

There’s no way he’s not going to look anything other than fucked-over and hell warmed over. Even his face, its earnest blue eyes and freckles and assertive nose, has its limits, and right now, he just looks like what he is: thirty-five and trying to use whiskey to cushion the fall from his high.

At least Moira’s brought something without yesterday’s wrinkles. He climbs into it, lets her knot the tie like a noose around his throat when his own fingers can’t manage it.

"You could," she says as she draws the silk through its knot, "always alibi him. You know where he was last night. It’d be the right thing to do, keep the investigation from wasting time and energy."

"And you know where he was last night," Charles reminds her.

Moira clucks and settles the tie against his chest, smoothing it out with her palm. “You forget, I’ve hitched my horse to your cart; I’m not going to let you drive us off a cliff.”

"You were ethical once, weren’t you?" Charles steps back and looks at himself in the mirror. He still looks like death, Death in a decent suit with coffee in his veins.

"Once," Moira agrees. She checks her own hair in the mirror and reaches for her suit jacket, abandoned on the back of the chair she’d been in, watching Charles sleep. "You’ve got five minutes."

* * *

The last time Charles saw the business card Summers now holds out for his inspection had been when a different hand had given it to him. That hand had been long-fingered and clever, and had cut a line of coke like a magician, and had known precisely what to do with Charles’s dick.

"What the fuck kind of a name is M?" Charles had asked when he’d been bent over the nightstand, staring up a line of white powder at the card where it had been forgotten by the alarm clock.

"Not a name," M-who-was-Erik said. "Didn’t your assistant give you my name?”

"Magnus." Charles leaned up and shivered, the rush just before the coke hit his bloodstream, turned around to give M’s cock a meaningful look. "Truth in advertising."

M grinned, wide and toothy and either stunningly sincere or patently false. 

"Middle name," he said, although he shifted to make sure Charles got an eyeful. It was a good eyeful, Charles decided.

"You got a first name?" The cocaine spun through his head like sweet nausea, making the world go unsteady. Charles sank back into the wreck of the bed, hoping vaguely for an anchor to keep him from drifting away.

"Erik," Erik said. He swung onto hands and knees, thick cock prominent between his legs. In the narrowing tunnel of Charles’s vision, he was lit up, saturated color, unreal grey eyes, his body heavy and solid.

It would do, Charles decided hazily as Erik got one leg over him to straddle him, clever card-trick hand going to his cock to stroke him. Erik’s body would do to hold him down.


	43. Water horse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Of course you didn’t," Eirich said. He frowned down at the boy, who did not seem properly cowed—who, instead, seemed terribly earnest and apologetic. In centuries past, Eirich would have taken him captive and dragged him down to the bottom of his lake, down to quiet cold and the slumbering plants—or, he thought, noticing the boy’s eyes were the living blue of the sky and not the deep, unbroken dark of the loch—perhaps not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Erik is an _each-uisge_ , a Celtic water spirit. Charles is the boy on holiday over the hill.

"Oh! Oh goodness," the boy, the human boy, said. “I’m very sorry; I didn’t see you there. And I, ah, didn’t see you skinny-dipping.” His gaze skipped down Eirich’s body before determinedly fastening on his face.

"Of course you didn’t," Eirich said. He frowned down at the boy, who did not seem properly cowed—who, instead, seemed terribly earnest and apologetic. In centuries past, Eirich would have taken him captive and dragged him down to the bottom of his lake, down to quiet cold and the slumbering plants—or, he thought, noticing the boy’s eyes were the living blue of the sky and not the deep, unbroken dark of the loch—perhaps not.

"I’m Charles." The boy held out a hand, which Eirich did not deign to accept. After a moment, the boy, Charles, retracted it. "Charles Xavier."

"You shouldn’t give out your name so freely, boy." In those same centuries, Eirich might have taken the boy’s name to use as the thread in a spell, a chain to draw him back to the loch. The each-uisge were good at that.

"Well, it’s not like you have my birthdate, or my credit cards," Charles Xavier said. Eirich blinked slowly at him. Charles Xavier’s mouth contracted in something that might be self-consciousness.

Once, a human would have known instantly what he was, would have known it and, if foolish enough to succumb to his spell, not have had long to feel regret before Eirich bore him off on his back and took him down to the deep and devoured him. The boy, Eirich saw, was toothsome in other ways; the each-uisge’s appetite was not only for food.

"Why are you out here by yourself?" Eirich asked. "Are you traveling? If so, you should move on."

"Oh," Charles Xavier said, "in a manner of speaking. I’ve the cabin just over the hill," he nodded to indicate the direction; Eirich saw he had freckles dusting his cheeks and nose, brought out by the high summer sun. "But I’m here the rest of the summer. Are you visiting too?"

"I live here."

"It’s very isolated, though," the human said.

"I like it."

"Ah." Charles Xavier sat back. His eyes seemed, like the sky, to see everything, and Eirich disliked it. Elves and enchanters had those eyes. "You have water weeds in your hair." He gestured to indicate where they were and then, as if he were helpless against the impulse, glanced down Eirich’s body.

Eirich was not a creature given to imagination, or to conjecture. The human boy wanted him; he could smell the heating of the boy’s blood, potent against the cold that ran through Eirich’s own veins. That warmth would burn in the frigid depths of the loch, bright as the sun. Eirich could keep it for his own, secreted away and safe, and wrap spells around it preserve it.

Come with me, Eirich wanted to say. The urge to transform itched in him, to kneel down on his forelegs and offer the boy his back to mount, to gallop out over the glassy surface of the loch before plunging into the heart of it.

Instead, reluctantly bespelled by Charles’s own fascination, he folded himself atop one of the rocks that ringed his loch, and, ignoring Charles’s admonition about the water weeds, said, “Tell me, Charles Xavier, why are you here?”


	44. Into the woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "No!" Erik barked. He tried to moderate his tone, because his mother was rapidly turning from enraptured at the young man in her kitchen to annoyed with Erik’s bad manners. "I mean, Mama, now isn’t the time. We’re both very tired. It’s been a long road, and we haven’t had any rest."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: Fantasy AU, a continuation of [this adorable comic](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/58555858624/palalife-reading-direction-left-to-right) by **palalife** <3 <3 She's so inspirational.

"Oh!" Erik’s mother said, blinking in surprise. "But his eyes are very blue, darling, just like you’ve written - "

"No!" Erik barked. He tried to moderate his tone, because his mother was rapidly turning from enraptured at the young man in her kitchen to annoyed with Erik’s bad manners. "I mean, Mama, now isn’t the time. We’re both very tired. It’s been a long road, and we haven’t had any rest."

"Of course, dear." Edie clucked. "This poor young man looks like he’s about to drop where he stands. Why don’t you have a seat, ah..?" She trailed off, peering closely at the king - looking for rank medallions. The king wore only unadorned armor and Erik’s wolfskin-lined cloak, and looked as dirty and disheveled as any foot soldier after two weeks on the march.

"Lieutenant," Erik said into the pause, giving thanks for the fact that his letters about the king had mentioned nothing specific—beyond references to his eyes, and an embarrassing admission about playing chess when his responsibilities took him to the Keep. He also gave thanks for the fact that his mother, tucked away in Ironwood as she was, had never once seen the king’s likeness.

"Lieutenant," his mother echoed. Her slim, tiny hand descended on the king’s shoulder and pushed him down into the chair closest to the fire. "Now, you just sit there and rest. Erik will fetch you water for washing-up, and I will cook you something. You look half-starved, poor thing." The king—Charles, Erik reminded himself; the king was Charles now—stared in mute astonishment at being so addressed. “And, while you eat, I’ll see about hemming up some of Erik’s old clothes for you, so you can wear something fresh while I see about cleaning your uniform. Poor dear.”

"Thank you, Madam Lehnsherr," Charles said, still managing to sound courtly despite what Erik imagined was surprised at being ordered about. "I’m very grateful, but I don’t want to put you to any—"

"It’s no trouble," Erik’s mother said firmly. "He so rarely brings any friends home, let alone… Well." She bustled over to the larder to collect ingredients - vegetables, garlic from wreaths hung in the rafters, salted meat - and began to work, a flurry of chopping and stirring. "Erik, see that you help your friend wash up before dinner. It won’t be long."

"Yes, Mama," Erik said, because even the Captain of the Guard had to answer his mother with respect. To the king, he said, "My lo - Francis, I’ll be right back."

"Thank you, Erik," the king murmured, and watched him go.


	45. Press conference

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Professor Xavier, any comments on the latest updates on the ongoing situation in Genosha?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: Modern AU, politics! From [this photoset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/56651846518/pearlo-professor-xavier-any-comments-on-the) and **pearlo** 's question.

"Professor Xavier, any comments on the latest updates on the ongoing situation in Genosha?"

"Do you mean my comments or the comments you want me to have?” Charles asks, striving for the pleasantness that disorients even more than hostility.

"Well," the reporter fumbles, belatedly remembering that he’s dealing with a telepath, albeit the telepath that’s been one of the mutants most vocally opposed to mutant separatism. The safe mutant, Charles thinks, until he’s not. The reporter finds his footing again, “What you think, Professor.”

"I think anyone who is surprised by slaves revolting against their oppressors is frighteningly naive, and anyone who refuses to support the mutants of Genosha based purely on what they are is mutantphobic and astoundingly ignorant of history."

"So you support mutants forming their own state?" another reporter, this one with curly red hair and a boldness that refuses to be cowed by Charles’s telepathy, asks. "And by extension, terroristic practices used to obtain it?"

"I didn’t hear anything in what I just said that advocated terrorism," Charles replies. "What I said was, failure to learn from history is dangerous for us all. And failure to recognize common humanity, and a common right to freedom, is even more dangerous."

The reporter scowls. Charles fields a few more questions while she gathers herself. He knows he should be inured to foolish questions, having taught many freshmen in his day, but these questions - baiting, jabbing, willfully obtuse - sting him like a swarm of annoying flies.

"Professor Xavier!" the reporter asks again. Charles, despite his ethics, filches her name from her head: Freddie Lounds, rude and unprofessional from curly red hair to booted toe. He also catches the question she’s about to ask, but he doesn’t dare keep her from asking it.

"Do your thoughts on the uprising in Genosha have anything to do with your prior relationship with the leader of that uprising, Erik Lehnsherr?”


	46. Ultimate Omega

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ultimate Omega was on sale, he saw, two for the price of one—and, at $35 for 120 gel capsules, still a rip-off. His irritation, already kindled by having to go grocery shopping in a store infested by morons, burst into full, glorious flame as he read the confident assertions beneath the label: guaranteed to improve pheromone levels, the bottle said, to augment fertility and to “stabilize blood chemistry” with only the purest, most potent herbal extractives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: A/O, modern AU, inspired (bizarrely) by a shopping trip:
> 
> I had to go grocery shopping today, which always puts me in a foul mood because people in grocery stores are oblivious dumbasses armed with shopping carts.
> 
> Today was no exception, but I did see this impressive display of Ultimate Omega supplement capsules at Whole Foods. And of course I went there and of course I thought of, like, Erik worrying he isn’t suitably omega enough (while telling himself he isn’t worrying, he’s above all that) to impress Charles, the hot alpha lab director (and what is he even thinking, he does not want to impress that cheerful British idiot with the perfect hair and blue eyes and smile and pheromones ugh), or Charles who’s fretting about uneven heats even though he knows intellectually it’s different for everyone and he does not place the least bit of faith in the assertions of companies that have lobbied to get out of FDA oversight and don’t conduct reasonable double-blind studies on their products, but maybe the placebo effect will be worth the $18.00 for a bottle of snake oil and he and Erik have been trying to get pregnant anyways (or he just wants to do this for peace of mind, it has nothing to do with the brooding, crabby alpha a couple of offices down).
> 
> But then. Then.

Most Sundays, Erik made a point of doing his shopping at nine-thirty, when the majority of the suburbs were likely to be in church and, therefore, not devoting their lives to getting in his way and being oblivious, cart-wielding idiots. Today, though, his parents had refused to let him leave their house for his own apartment until they’d stuffed him full of breakfast and his alpha-parent had packed him a cooler of leftovers. And, Erik remembered as he scowled at the two oblivious betas and their carts, brunch had been served with yet another lecture from them about how they wished he’d find someone and settle down.

"It’s not that we think you need an alpha to take care of you," his omega-parent had said while Erik tried to concentrate on his breakfast. Erik opened his mouth to protest that, no, it was that they thought he needed an alpha to take care of him, but she continued, “You know we’re very proud that you’re independent and can take care of yourself. It’s just that we don’t want you to be alone, Erik. Those are very different things.”

 _Whatever_ Erik thought now. He tossed a box of oatmeal into his cart. As he attempted to advance, however, he found the aisle blocked—still—by the two betas, who were chattering mindlessly about their kids’ soccer club, and their carts, which had been placed specifically for the purpose of getting in Erik’s way.

Fine, then. Erik gave one cart a gentle nudge with his abilities and watched as it glided down the aisle, away from its owner and toward the exit. The cart kept going, and going, past the wondering eyes of the few customers who could be bothered to pay attention, and right to the sliding doors. An alarm blared shrilly, louder even than the beta’s indignant, “My fucking cart!”

Slightly appeased, Erik made his way down the now-clear aisle and turned for the pharmacy and hygiene section.

More or less on automatic, Erik added unscented body soap and shampoo to his cart, sparing a ferocious scowl for the racks and racks of products that promised herbal scents that were naturally alluring, designed specifically to attract that elusive alpha who, apparently, could only be seduced by pale chemical imitations of bergamot and sandalwood. Erik stalked past the antiperspirants and racks of essential oils, intending to get his multivitamins and then getting the hell out.

He was in mid-reach, and mid-rant about the shelves and shelves of pre-natal supplements and supplements for healthy hair and heat regulation, when a yellow tag caught the corner of his gaze. Unwillingly, Erik found his attention arrested by it.

Ultimate Omega was on sale, he saw, two for the price of one—and, at $35 for 120 gel capsules, still a rip-off. His irritation, already kindled by having to go grocery shopping in a store infested by morons, burst into full, glorious flame as he read the confident assertions beneath the label: guaranteed to improve pheromone levels, the bottle said, to augment fertility and to “stabilize blood chemistry” with only the purest, most potent herbal extractives.

"That tells me absolutely nothing," Erik growled at the bottles, "except that whoever wrote you is full of shit and capitalizing on general scientific illiteracy and the insecurity of every omega out there. Not to mention whatever racket it is your lobbyists have going with the FDA."

As he glared at the shelves of Ultimate Omega, though, Erik heard his parents’ voices creeping up like unwanted spirits. He was thirty-four, almost past the peak of being able to attract a mate (never mind that Erik had shown them studies saying this wasn’t true), far more devoted to his work than to any flesh-and-blood creature, aggressive and hostile and impatient—none of which omegas were supposed to be, at least out of heat—and hadn’t spent so much as one heat cycle with the company of any other person except himself. And if he’d spent those weeks wishing he’d had someone there to care for him as he sweated and trembled, well, the impulse always went away.

Or, at least it had until Charles Xavier had arrived to take over the projects in the lab one floor down from Erik’s. Erik absolutely was not going to think about Dr. Charles Xavier and his stupid hair, or his stupid tea addiction that the entire lab thought was adorable, or his stupidly vivid blue eyes or his stupid alpha pheromones that Erik swore had to be unnaturally augmented because he should not be able to smell them that clearly, or feel like the alpha himself was standing just around the corner no matter where Erik was.

Still. Charles probably liked soft, sweet omegas. He might even have one, despite Erik (who had not been eavesdropping) hearing him say he was unmated. The kind of omega who knew how to make proper tea and lived to be taken care of. Old-fashioned. And plenty of alphas who said they liked _independent omegas really didn’t, or at least they liked independence until Erik exercised his independence in a way they didn’t like, and that was the end of that._

_"There’s more to being an omega than just pheromones," he grumbled. And speaking of pheromones, maddeningly, he could still smell Charles, despite the fact that they’d last seen each other on Friday, when Charles had looked up from his tablet and wished him a good weekend and Erik had muttered a graceless “See you next week,” and left._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I could have sworn I had another part to this but I can't find it anywhere. I have really vivid (not real?) memories of writing a scene where Erik and Charles end up bumping into each other at the store and have awkward conversation that ends when Charles asks Erik out on a date and Erik feels victorious because he didn't need that stupid Ultimate Omega after all so fuck them.


	47. Blush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles is impertinent; Erik is too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on this one: Regency AU; based on [this photoset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/63416565210/the-young-man-did-not-look-away-as-erik-expected) (required for context).

The young man did not look away as Erik expected. The gaze that met his was not immodest, nor impertinent; rather, it took stock of Erik’s observation and coolly judged him—and even, Erik found, accused him of impertinence.

It was not a judgment one ought to permit from a young man fished, almost literally, from a rain-flooded forest path, a young man then sheltered, dried, warmed, cleaned, dressed, and in due course fed and given a glass of wine and a place by the fire. Yet Erik found himself permitting it, as he had found himself insisting that the boy return to the damned house with him so he would not have to return to his hunting park and find a corpse. The fire had transmuted the boy’s skin and hair to gold and bronze, or to shadow in other places, but that warmth failed to penetrate the eyes, which held only annoyance and a vivid blue.

"Blushing," the young man said, the two syllables precisely enunciated. "Why would you think that?"

He thought it, remembering how he had stood outside the rooms he himself had given to the boy, staying under pretext of waiting for the servant to return with towels. No pretext, though, had permitted what he’d done next: looking around and through the open door to see the boy’s naked shoulders and belly, the shift of weight onto one foot and the mathematical curve of his spine as he stepped into the tub. Steam rising from the water had already turned his pale, freckled skin a soft pink, the color washing sweetly across his nipples and collar bones.

Before the boy could open his eyes and see Erik watching in wretched fascination, Erik had turned back to the safety of the hallway. Yet heat had still touched him; it had insinuated itself into him, as living and organic as the steam that had wrapped around the boy’s naked body, and still, in the civility of his drawing-room, it burned.

"Mr. Lehnsherr," the boy murmured, a smile touching that red, red mouth, "I believe _you’re_ blushing."


	48. Free samples

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there was one place in the world Erik loathed, it was the mall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Modern AU, based on [this very appealing photoset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/65579139504/luninosity-pangeasplits-no-stop-id-buy).

If there was one place in the world Erik loathed, it was the mall.

Malls were full of people, people who had been put on the earth specifically to annoy him and get in his way. Teenagers, mostly, but also women traveling in fleets with massive strollers, or bored and oblivious men ambling slowly along while they stared vacantly into Hot Topic and Spencer’s. More teenagers, shrieking at each other or at their cell phones. Pushy salespeople who needed to be warned off with bared teeth.

The worst ones were the ones who lurked in department stores or just outside their shops and laid in wait with offers of sales Erik was not interested in or free samples of things that smelled or crumbled or got stuck to his suit. And it seemed as if, the greater his hurry to get his one errand done and over with, the more likely they were to latch on to him, sharks scenting blood and wounded, impatient prey. It had gotten so that he had devised a route through the mall that would let him avoid the more impertinent or persistent ones.

"Can I interest you in a free sample?"

God dammit. He’d been so preoccupied with his annoyance that he’d forgotten to detour around the annoying organic and repurposed housewares store. 

Erik turned slightly to give the salesperson the benefit of his opinion about people who bothered people who were clearly in a hurry to get somewhere.

His opinion dissipated under the force of a cheerful and almost unbelievably earnest smile, and bright blue eyes.

"It’s Linen Breeze," the young man said, blissfully ignorant of how ridiculous Linen Breeze sounded. “It’s not cologne, it’s for bedsheets and such. It comes in spray and sachet form, for your linen closet.”

Wordless, for the first time in a long while, Erik accepted the strip of heavy white paper, a little damp from the spray. The young man beamed as if Erik had done him a great favor. “We also have other scents, if you’d prefer.”

"I have to go," he said, nonsensically.

"Of course!" the young man said. "Have a lovely day!"

Erik left, and if he left in a hurry, he was not fleeing, just moving briskly. He turned over the freshly-imprinted memory of the young man’s face and his smile and how, generally, he seemed to stand out from the utter bland sameness of a suburban mall. And, Erik thought distantly, he didn’t even have a nametag. He might just be a strange young man who parked himself outside of shops to accost strangers.

By the time he finished with his errands, he casually meandered back in the direction of the organic-eco-vegan housewares store, attempting to appear more interested in the Sharper Vision and Disney Store than seeing if the young man was still at his station.

He wasn’t.

Erik was not desperate enough to go into the store and ask if the nameless, pretty, blue-eyed associate was still in, or if he was on break. He was not. And to prove it, he firmed his grip on his shopping bags and stalked out to his car.

It was only once he was at his car, searching through his pockets for his keys, that he realized he still had the scrap of paper the young man had given him. Feeling supremely foolish, and as if every security camera in the parking garage were riveted upon him, and as if the young man were watching him somehow, Erik pulled the paper out and held it up.

He had intended to smell it, and maybe indulge in a shameful fantasy about this being how the young man smelled, fresh and sharp and clean, but intentions and fantasy dissolved when he saw something had been written on the little paper tab.

It was, Erik saw, a phone number.


	49. Halloween

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five AU snippets for Halloween.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Five snippets for Halloween 2013.
> 
>  **Trick or treat** : Modern AU; Professor Dad meets Dadneto, with bb Raven and bb Lorna. Tiny zombies and vampire fairy princesses.
> 
>  **Homemade** : Modern AU; bb!Erik and bb!Charles have the best costumes _ever_.
> 
>  **Equinox** : Ancient/prehistoric AU; the year turns and the spirits watch it.
> 
>  **Demonology** : Medieval/Renaissance AU; necromancer!Erik gets a rude surprise.
> 
>  **Important birds** : AU where they are birds; Erik does not like trick-or-treating.

**Trick or treat**

Charles was nearly fifteen years, a doctorate, and a teaching position removed from his rugby days but still moved like a forward fielding a stray ball. He had a traumatized, wailing Raven scooped up and in his arms and out of the way of the terrifying, if microscopic, zombie.

The zombie glared up at Raven, who, emboldened in the safety of Charles’s arms, was attempting to cover the humiliation of crying by making faces at her opponent. “What’re you suppozed to be?” the zombie demanded.

"A sparkly vampire princess," Raven said, investing the words with all the scorn a six-year-old was capable of. "What are you?”

"We," said a new voice, older and masculine, and, Charles saw, belonging to someone very attractive, "are running late. Your bedtime’s in an hour, Lorna. Don’t you have more candy to extort from people?"

"My bedtime is never," Raven said. It was patently untrue, but Charles had allowed her an extra hour to count her candy stash and work off whatever sugar she’d managed to ingest.

The zombie, however, gazed up at her own parent with betrayed, tragic zombie eyes. “Daddy! Come onnnnnnn.”

"Nice try," the zombie’s father said.

The zombie’s attractive father, Charles thought wistfully. Raven’s arrival had put an end to his dating life, or rather, put it out of its misery. He tried to stare covertly at the zombie’s attractive father, and tried to forget that he had cat whiskers painted on his face (Raven had insisted) and a giant pumpkin-shaped bucket in his hand.

While he tried to forget, the zombie and her father moved off, the zombie tugging him along when he refused to walk any faster.

"Shall we go this way, Raven?" Charles asked, and indicated, very casually, that they should follow.

"Okayyyy," Raven said. "But only if I get a Snickers."

* * *

**Homemade**

Erik Lehnsherr, despite being seven years old, was an excellent strategist, especially when it came to Halloween. He knew the houses that gave out the best candy, how to keep his mom away from other adults (they’d just start talking and Erik would lose valuable trick-or-treating time) and how to avoid the packs of slow-moving smaller children.

If he could just get Charles to go along with his plan to further maximize their candy profits, he would truly be the Master of Halloween, as well as the Master of Magnetism.

"Come on, Charles." Erik was not above coaxing, or wheedling. "You have telepathy. You can have as many costumes as you want! You can get as much candy as you want.” That was even leaving aside the fact he could scan the residents of various houses and see if they had candy worth the trip up their driveway.

"But I can’t eat all of it, and it wouldn’t be fair to the other kids" Charles said. Before Erik could point out that eating extra candy what Erik was for, and they could always give the less-desirable candy to Charles’s little sister, and also candy was far more important than fairness, Charles added, “Besides, we worked really hard on my X-Wing costume for my wheelchair and I want everyone to see it.”

They had, Erik reflected. It was the coolest costume ever, other than Erik’s supervillain costume. They had spent the past few weekends painting and taping and gluing cardboard with Charles’s dad, until Charles’s wheelchair looked like an X-Wing fighter and Charles like its pilot, complete with orange jumpsuit and goofy helmet.

Charles, of course, caught him thinking about it. “I wish you would have agreed to go as R2. Then it would have been perfect.”

"There are limits," Erik reminded him. "Now let’s go before the Hendersons run out of the full-sized Milky Ways."

* * *

**Equinox**

The year was halfway through its last turning, heading down into the darkness of winter before the hinge at which the old year died and the new one rose from the darkness. The humans had gathered their cattle in the lowland valleys, their stores of crops laid away after the last of the summer harvests, their swords and ships put by for the winter. 

With the night drawing down more swiftly, the humans already had their great bonfires built, two dancing masses of orange light that lit the grassland and the edges of the forest where the two spirits sat. As the spirits watched, one of them in frowning silence as ominous as the hastening night and the other with more patience, a few humans crept some distance from the safety of their fires and set offerings on the clean, open ground.

"Mead and honey and grain," the frowning one said.

"And meat," said the other. He sniffed the air, which carried the scent of cooked meat, and the bloody earth of the slaughtering ground. "Are you appeased?" he asked, with a bit of irony. "Shall we spare them for the winter and not trouble them with our passing?"

"I suppose," said the darker spirit, and in a flicker of witchlight vanished back into their forest.

The humans cried out and fled for the safety of their circle of huts and the fence, made of ancient oaks, surrounding it. The spirit frowned, smelling the dead wood, the sharp evergreen browning and scorching in the fires, but vanished himself, disappearing like a passing breeze.

* * *

**Demonology**

_What avails me law or medicine or philosophy or the secrets of the Heavens? None can suffice to grant Lehnsherr what he desires. Lesser necromancers mine their grimoires to conjure a harem of beauties, wealth hauled on demons’ backs from the far reaches of the globe, power over the kings of the earth and immortality to enjoy it. Not Erik Lehnsherr! His hunger is for far nobler meats, dishes sweeter to the tongue. He desires vengeance, and vengeance he shall have!_

_Now, Lehnsherr, steel thy will and bend thy wisdom to the strange symbols writ in the volume you hold in steady hands. Observe the shapes and trace them well, light the fires as Agrippa’s art commands thee. And now chant this final infernal hymn—_

"Oh, good grief, not again.”

The necromancer stopped dead, staring in disbelief at the newly-conjured creature in the center of his Solomon’s circle. He had fully expected an entity to appear there, for although new in the art of necromancy he was yet skilled, yet he had expected something green and loathsome, with reptiles’ skin and the golden, glaring eyes of a cat, or goat’s hooves and a lion’s twitching tail.

"Yes, I’m very sorry, but that grimoire you have there," said the fair-skinned and handsome, blue-eyed, regular-footed, un-betailed young man, "has a flaw. A scribe, you see, wrote down the incantation for an incubus under the rubric for Maphistophilis, Arch-Demon. I’d thought we’d taken all those copies out of circulation, but I suppose not."

The necromancer, aware that his mouth was hanging open, shut it. Nerve thyself to thy task, magician! It may yet be you may find some use of him.

"And please stop thinking in the third person," the incubus added. "It’s very tiresome. Speaking of tiresome," the incubus looked around the secret tower where the necromancer conducted his unholy art, "do you happen to have a bed anywhere about?"

* * *

**Important birds**

The doorbell rang again and Erik shrieked again.

"Don’t worry," Charles said, clucking and cooing reassurance. His friend, though, only continued to stalk back and forth along his perch, his wings mantled threateningly as he hissed and squawked. "It always happens this one night every year, Erik! There’s no need to fret, though; Hank only gives the little humans candy and then they go away."

"Extortion!" Erik snapped. He paused in his back-and-forth pacing to yank on the little bells hung from the bars of their cage. "They only leave if Hank gives them candy. Our candy! They steal what is rightfully ours!”

"We don’t eat candy," Charles pointed out. "And human children aren’t interested in seed bars and peanut butter."

"Still," Erik said darkly. He stopped pacing, although he still glared ferociously at the front door. "It’s ours, and the human is only encouraging the little humans to invade our territory. What if they decide to take the candy from him instead of being happy with whatever he gives them? They could come for our seed bars next.”

"I don’t think that will happen," Charles said.

"Shows what you know," Erik said darkly and, after seizing a beakful of seed and peanut butter, began to pace again.


	50. Indoor picnic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The power goes out. The romance goes on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Modern-ish AU; inspired by [this lovely photo](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/66422046462/pearlo-now-i-want-charles-making-an-indoor).

_No, I promise that it’s nothing wrong with the house, so don’t bother trying to find the problem_ , Charles said in response to the silent five-minute tirade emanating from the utility room. _I checked with the power company; it’s a major storm, and the electricity’s out all over—and no, you are not going to try whatever you’re planning! The wiring in this house is far too old to have you mucking with it._

More silent grumbling—and probably audible grumbling that Charles couldn’t hear—answered him, before sulky resignation set in. _Now, come on back to the study _.__

__A few minutes later, Erik’s shadow manifested in the darkness, sliding through a patch of lesser darkness that was one of the study windows. Rain and wind beat angrily against the other side of the glass, and the rain flung what sounded like hail against the side of the house while it twisted the trees and yanked them back and forth._ _

__It would have been the perfect prelude to a grisly, supernatural murder, Charles thought as he lit one last candle, with the dark, stormy night and the slim, deliberately-moving shape… except for the fact that the mind belonging to the shape was silently complaining about having to deal with a power outage on a Friday night at the end of a bad week, and wondering what Charles could possibly be getting up to._ _

__"Candles, Charles?" Erik said. "We have flashlights."_ _

__"Which are hardly convivial," Charles countered._ _

__"Why would we want—"_ _

__Telepathy meant he didn’t need to see Erik’s face to know the instant Erik registered the rest of his surroundings: quilts and comforters and pillows piled on the floor, candles in banks on nearby tables and on a silver tray set on the floor. The candlelight caught in the facets of the cut glass bottle of Scotch—the best Charles had, hoarded away for a night like tonight—and on the silver of another tray, this one piled with food._ _

__"Since we don’t know when we’ll be getting power back," Charles said as he sank down onto one collection of pillows, "I thought we should start working our way through the perishables. I’ve got cheese, fruit, ice cream…" that was in a cooler with ice, "and of course alcohol."_ _

__"Which isn’t perishable," Erik said, and shadows or not, Charles could almost see the quirk of that eyebrow and the corner of Erik’s mouth._ _

__"And what kind of indoor picnic would it be without too much alcohol and drunkenly making out?" Charles asked, grinning up at the vague shape that was Erik’s face._ _

__The vagueness resolved as Erik moved closer, into the circle cast by the candlelight. He was very beautiful, Charles thought, gilding and shadow like chiaroscuro across his cheekbones and under his brows, his neck. Beautiful or not, Erik maneuvered cautiously over to Charles and sank down almost as carefully._ _

__"I’m not used to the power being off," Erik muttered. "I’m having to reorient myself."_ _

__"Then," Charles said happily, pressing a brief _welcome home_ kiss to Erik’s cheek, ”we should just stay in one place, shouldn’t we?”_ _

__"We should," Erik agreed, smile unmistakable from this close up._ _

__"Good!" Charles reached for a strawberry, plump and deep, dusky red. He held it to Erik’s mouth, still parted in amusement. "Now, darling, have something to eat."_ _


	51. How to woo a Lehnsherr

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wooing Erik Lehnsherr was, according to the few survivors of the experience, not easily done. Charles had watched many alphas dragging the savaged remains of their egos back home, and even consoled some of them himself while analyzing where they’d gone wrong so he wouldn’t misstep and wander into the minefield that was Erik.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one Modern AU; A/O (alpha!Charles, omega!Erik); inspired by [this photoset](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/67299752799/trobador-x-x-omega-erik-provocatively).

Wooing Erik Lehnsherr was, according to the few survivors of the experience, not easily done. Charles had watched many alphas dragging the savaged remains of their egos back home, and even consoled some of them himself while analyzing where they’d gone wrong so he wouldn’t misstep and wander into the minefield that was Erik.

On the other side of showing Erik his liquor cabinet and very comfortable couch and building a cozy fire in the library and inviting Erik to sit on said comfortable couch while they drank whiskey from said cabinet, and listening intently to Erik ranting about the idiots in government, Erik had rubbed his neck in that particular spot right behind his ear and touched two fingers to Charles’s neck, rubbing scent into it and mingling Charles’s with his own.

While Charles stared at him, torn between joy and disbelief, Erik growled, “Are you just going to stand there or are you going to do something already?”

"Oh, do something, very definitely," Charles breathed, and leaned in for a first kiss.


	52. Time-traveling and other romantic situations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A great flash of light enveloping the car, electricity saturating the air, and a heavy thump and lurch interrupted the driver’s imprecations. The tires screeched weakly on the wet cement and Erik was catapulted forward against his seatbelt. He was finding breath to excoriate the driver when he heard the panicked “Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck, oh shit” coming over the intercom, and realized that the idiot had hit someone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for this one: Modern AU-meets-Regency, romantic comedy; busy, irritable CEO Erik Lehnsherr meets the most brilliant inventor he's never heard of.

Because this was the way of things, the storm broke twenty minutes before Erik Lehnsherr absolutely had to leave the office. Outside the windows of Eisenhardt Ltd., the sky darkened as if someone had thrown a switch, and then, as if someone had thrown yet another switch, lightning whipcracked over the city, thunder boomed melodramatically, and the rain came bucketing down.

Erik mowed down another hapless pedestrian on his way to the town car. The driver of the town car, unsheltered by any umbrella, prudently cowered behind the opened rear passenger-side door, only to have it yanked out of his grip when Erik decided to close the door himself. A moment later, the door opened a crack so Erik could shout “I haven’t got all day!” and so the driver could retreat to the safety of the driver’s eat - and raise the privacy panel.

In the back, Erik scowled out the tinted windows at the city crawling by. His day had already been filled with idiots and now his evening would be too, with Sebastian Shaw’s tedious gala to benefit mutant rights. Erik was as ardent a supporter of mutant rights as anyone, but Shaw’s mutant ability seemed to be to absorb kinetic energy and redirect it as a truly obnoxious grandiosity, and to coat his body and everything he touched with a thin sheen of oily superciliousness. Erik could practically feel it on him already, and they still had ten blocks to go, wading through the tempest, to the Waldorf.

Perhaps it was his desire to get the evening with as swiftly as possible so he could go home and be a misanthrope (Raven’s term, not his), but he found himself wrapping his power around the car, trying to nudge it forward just a little faster. 

"Hey!" the driver said over the intercom. "Izzat you doing that? Knock it the — I mean, sir, if you would be so kind as to — "

A great flash of light enveloping the car, electricity saturating the air, and a heavy thump and lurch interrupted the driver’s imprecations. The tires screeched weakly on the wet cement and Erik was catapulted forward against his seatbelt. He was finding breath to excoriate the driver when he heard the panicked “Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck, oh shit” coming over the intercom, and realized that the idiot had hit someone.

Erik yanked the privacy screen back. Through the little rectangle, he saw the driver’s hunched back, a pale hand that did not belong to the driver flailing at the hood of the car. Horns raised in a cacophony behind them, but Erik could hear the driver’s high-pitched and hysterical, “Buddy, hey, mister, you okay? Didn’t see you, what the hell — ” and then something Erik hoped had to do with the stupidity of darting across traffic against the light in a New York City rush hour.

The rest of the owner of the pale hand emerged slowly, moving gingerly against what Erik suspected would be at least bruised ribs.

Having lived in New York City for nearly his entire life, Erik considered himself immune to nearly all extraordinary phenomena. This included the still-staggering victim of the driver’s incompetence, who wore a high-collared green coat and a sad, sodden-looking white cravat, and had what might otherwise be a full head of brown hair plastered flat. He and the driver were exchanging words, which remarkably did not seem to be threats of lawsuits—that was actually rather more extraordinary than the young man’s appearance (he was, in fact, young, or at least looked as much). In fact, the driver moved to assist him, taking him by the elbow and helping him over to—

Erik opened his mouth to protest. No. He had hired this car, he was already late, and he was not going to share his car with a soaking wet imbecile on his way to some historical reenactment. Despite the strength of Erik’s silent objections, the other door opened and the young man was deposited in a wet, ungainly heap on the seat next to Erik.

"Who the hell are you?" Erik said wrathfully. "I have very good lawyers."

"Charles Xavier, Earl of Westchester, at your service, sir," the young man said, bowing rather stiffly. A drop of water ran off his nose and hit the leather of the seat. "I would greet you in the manner of your own people and I deeply regret my interruption of your journey and any damage caused to your conveyance, but I beg your forgiveness, I do not quite know when I am."

"Excuse me?" Head injury suggested itself; certainly the young man’s eyes ere very bright—glassy, in the dome light.

"Oh, my head is quite well," Charles Xavier, the Earl of Westchester, said. "If anything, only my pride received a buffeting. Or," he winced a little, "perhaps my ribs."

Erik was starting to feel rather buffeted himself, but not so buffeted that he missed the fact that the young man—Charles Xavier, the Earl of Westchester—had responded to an unvocalized thought. Erik felt somewhat more capable of dealing with another mutant, however fantastically dressed; at any rate, he was significantly more willing.

"Would you mind elaborating on the when I am part of what you just said?”

"Not at all!" The Earl was enthusiastically inspecting the stitching on the back of the driver’s seat and then, before Erik could stop him, depressing the button for the privacy screen. He jumped as it slid back up. "Oh, delightful. Your time seems to be an age of wonders.”

"Yes, it is," Erik snapped. "Now, explain.”

"It’s a bit complicated to explain _in toto_ ,” the Earl said, refusing to be rushed. “But to sum up, my colleague Dr. McCoy’s telekinematitron malfunctioned rather spectacularly about—” he pulled a watch from the pocket of his waistcoat; Erik saw, and felt, the parallel rows of scratches across the silver casing, “—seven days ago. The poor lad’s been trying to get me back to our own era for a week now.”

Time travel? Erik had heard of mutant who could shift time, but never more than a few minutes at a time. The Earl, clearly picking up the thought, shook his head; a few more drops of water joined that pooling on the seat. “Purely inadvertent, I assure you,” he said. “It has been quite fascinating, though. Do you have trains in this era, still?”

"Yes," Erik said, aware that he had, somehow, accepted the reality of a time-displaced mutant.

"Pardon, sir…" Erik scowled at the driver, who was hovering ineffectually at the Earl’s shoulder, and then at the line of indignant traffic trying to inch around them. The Earl watched the cars with as much fascination as he had shown the privacy window, and stared at the rain-slicked facade of the Ritz-Carlton and the shadow of Central Park just over Erik’s shoulder.

"Sir, you need a hospital?" the driver asked. And then, ignoring the fact that Erik had been the one to buy his services, added, "Or is there somewhere I could take you?"

"No need to trouble yourself about a hospital," the Earl said cheerily. "They sound rather like noisy, unpleasant places. I, on the other hand, could do with a spot of quiet and the opportunity to procure rather dryer clothes. Is there a hotel anywhere about?"

"Are you planning on paying them in shillings?" Erik snapped. It would be, he decided, much better to play along. The Earl opened his mouth, as if there were really an answer that was logical and not completely insane, but before he could add to the surreality that had become the evening, Erik said, "You’ll come home with me."

"There’s no need," the Earl began apologetically.

"You’ll get me out of a tedious social obligation," Erik said, "Now, let’s get going."

The Earl beamed at him and settled in, long hair dripping freely on the upholstery. Then he sneezed. Erik sighed and turned up the heat.


End file.
